Old time radio, Gunsmoke

William Conrad

I grew up on radio in the 1940s and early 1950s, and I have come to think of these years before TV as a golden age of storytelling. It did not require the cheap tricks of TV to hold an audience’s attention, just voices, sound effects, and a little music between scenes.

For me, CBS radio’s long-running series, Gunsmoke (1952–1961), is the best example. It opened the listener’s imagination to a gritty, sweaty, dusty Old West that the TV series approximated but never quite matched. It had a tone and attitude that was often moody and downbeat. Its central character, U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon, was a weary officer of the law, drawn more directly from the school of hardboiled crime fiction than he was the handsome, patiently congenial and family-friendly man behind the badge TV gave us.

The two Dillons. I like James Arness’s Dillon. He is a likable guy, a basically easy-going man with a ready smile, yet always ready when needed to use his authority in the service of law and order.

Angle of repose

Angle of repose

I would not know the meaning of this term were it not for Wallace Stegner’s novel of the same name. I think of it whenever I pass along a narrow roadway cut from a rocky hillside where I sometimes walk in the desert. 

The road was once planned, I gather, for access to lots for houses with high views of the valley below and the mountain range beyond. Now the shelf of exposed granite is crumbling and spills into a slope of debris that’s held in place by gravity—at an angle of repose—until more rock falls and new instability urges a new state of rest.

All of this is a roundabout way of talking about time. As each day passes, I cross it off the desk calendar where I keep track of doctors appointments and bills to pay. Above on the wall is a battery-powered clock that ticks off the seconds. Meanwhile, out in the desert I am witness to geological time in the exposed layers of rock strata and twisting ravines. Everywhere I am reminded of this adventure of being human and how, more than ever after 72 years, it is linked to time’s coming and going.

Coming: A Glossary of Frontier Fiction

OK, I have completed, proofed, polished, and sent off Vol. 2 of How the West Was Written. (For more about Vol. 1 and how to get your copy—published by Beat to a Pulp Press and at a hard to beat price—click on the book cover in the left sidebar.)

Time to move on to the next project, a glossary of frontier fiction, which covers the same years, 1880–1915. As I read more from this period, I continue to add words, phrases, and their definitions. Here is the current crop from recent reading:

Bill = reference to a Wild West show, as in Bill-show, Bill-show cowboy, Bill-horse. “You she’d have seen Rusty Mikel, Miss, the time his Bill-hoss turned a flip-flop onto him.” Herman Whitaker, Over the Border.

charro = a Mexican horseman or cowboy, typically one wearing an elaborate outfit, often with silver decorations, of tight trousers, ruffled shirt, short jacket, and sombrero. “In their motley uniforms, regulation khaki or linen alternating with tight charro suits and peon cottons, they were exceedingly picturesque.” Herman Whitaker, Over the Border.

Chemisettes, 1850

chemisette = a woman's garment of linen, lace, or the like, worn, toward the end of the Victorian era, over a low-cut or open bodice to cover the neck and breast. “Under pretense of admiring the hand-made lace edging on the girl’s chemisette, she managed another peep and saw the leather worked with Gordon’s monogram in gold.” Herman Whitaker, Over the Border.

calzones = breeches, pants. “It appears that he had only has dirty cotton calzones to be buried in, so his wife begged a worn white suit from Mr. Benson.” Herman Whitaker, Over the Border.

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915)

Willa Cather, c1912

Willa Cather was a fine writer, with a special take on what it was like to grow up in a small town on the plains among descendants of immigrant homesteaders. The Song of the Lark tells of a young woman, Thea Kronborg, with a talent for music, who as the daughter of a minister finds friendship and approval not among her peers but among older men: a railway brakeman, the town doctor, and a piano teacher. They coach her through childhood and into adulthood, encouraging her to develop her musical abilities.

Plot. Cather follows her heroine to Chicago to study with a pianist, who discovers that she has an even greater talent for singing. Eventually, she goes to Germany to train as an operatic singer, and by novel’s end, she has been cast in roles that have her drawing enthusiastic audiences at the Met in New York.

The Legend of the Reno Brothers

Review and interview

Given the fascination that outlaws hold for Western fans, it’s surprising that so little is known about the Reno Gang. While the stories of the Jameses and Youngers and Billy the Kid are common knowledge, the train robbing Reno brothers of southern Indiana are unknown outside of a couple of Hollywood movies, Rage at Dawn and Love Me Tender, the former a vehicle for Randolph Scott, the latter a showcase for the emerging talent of a singer by the name of Elvis Presley.

As we learn in this recent documentary film from historian David Distler and his colleagues, the Renos are credited with having pulled off the first peacetime train robbery in history. They were also the brains behind a post-Civil War crime wave that ranged over several states and enlisted a band of 100 or more lawbreakers like themselves.

There’s little one can say to romanticize or excuse their often violent and brutal exploits. The Pinkerton agency was hired to bring them under arrest, and the story might have ended there, except that neighboring communities, particularly Seymour, Indiana, took their criminal rampage personally. Abetted by a crusading local newspaperman, they organized a vigilance committee intent on sidestepping due process.

Mood swings

San Jacinto, Palm Springs

A week after the last five-day round of chemo and the four days of fatigue that routinely follow, my energy levels are mostly back to the new normal. I am not sleeping away the afternoons with an unread Kindle somewhere beside me, or the dog on top of me.

So I scheduled two appointments, long postponed, one with an ophthalmologist; another with a dentist and oral hygienist. My mood had been fluctuating like the stock market, hitting some bruising lows, and I enjoyed meeting new people and giving my usual reply to “How are you?” with my usual “Happy as a clam.” 

No doubt it’s an act, my playing the cheerful cancer patient, but it fools me, too, and that’s more than enough excuse for the duplicity. My dark mood lifted and was gone. The stock market could sink like the Titanic.

Herman Whitaker, Over the Border (1917)

Recently I reviewed the movie based on this novel, 3 Bad Men (1926), and I was curious how one had been adapted into the other. Surprisingly, the underlying plots of both are recognizably similar. Three rustlers give up their lives of thievery when they decide to come to the aid of a young woman whose father has been killed.

Realizing that she would benefit from marriage to a better man than any of them, they go out and find one for her. Circumstances then arrange themselves in such a way that all three former thieves, now fully reformed, give up their lives to protect the young couple as they are all pursued by murderous villains.

The big difference between the two stories is that the original, in Herman Whitaker’s novel, takes place entirely in Mexico, during the revolution (1910–1920). The movie version is set in Dakota Territory, where a wagon train arrives at the town of Custer to await the opening of Indian lands to settlers, and the villains are a corrupt sheriff and his henchmen, intent on acquiring a map to a gold strike.