FFB: Bob St. John, On Down the Road

Written and published in 1977, this is a great book about rodeo, with something like 250 photographs of rodeo cowboys in action, many of them in color. But it's not just a picture book. The author Bob St. John is a sports writer, and he covers the subject with the kind of depth you expect from good sports writing. 

His specialty is getting up-close and personal with the greats and near-greats of the sport. Thirty-some years ago, that meant men like Larry Mahan, Donnie Gay, Jim Shoulders, and Leo Camarillo.

He travels with them from rodeo to rodeo, sitting up with them in motel rooms late at night, listening to their stories, and capturing their personalities in the way they talk, tell jokes, even sing songs.

It’s a time capsule of a period when traditional rodeo was getting more like show business, but it was still not far from its roots. St. John pays plenty of attention to the events and the action in the arena, including the work of the rodeo clowns. There’s also a great deal more about what goes on behind the scenes, as he portrays the lives and personal histories of the men and women who "go on down the road."

This book is out of print. Used copies can be found at amazon.

Coming up: Francis Lynde, The Taming of Red Butte Western (1910)

Willard Wyman, High Country

This novel sets out to be a character study about a man who lives and works as a packer in the mountains of Montana and California. Ty Hardin takes his first job leading a string of mules in the Swan Range north of Missoula. He’s a teenager with no trail experience and only an aptitude with animals.

It’s 1937, and from his first boss, Fenton, he learns a love of the mountains that is next to mystical. Lifted there high above the everyday concerns of everyday folks, he is at home. His quiet strength, work ethic, and finely tuned skills eventually make him a legend among his peers.

Character. A character study succeeds to the extent that it finds ambiguities and complexities in its subject. Since no one is perfect, it shouldn’t be surprising to reveal a weakness or fault. But Wyman’s portrayal of Ty tends to be worshipful, and where his halo may slip a little, it’s easily excused.

Wyman celebrates a kind of character we associate with traditional Western values. Ty represents an ideal of individualism and self-reliance that also honors a code of responsibility to others. He may pass an evening at the town brothel or fly into a rare rage when another man insults his dance partner. But he has been stripped of every bit of human meanness.

Martha Sandweiss, Passing Strange

This is a story of eminent geologist Clarence King (1842-1901) and the secret he kept from even his closest friends – that he led a double life. A white man from the upper classes, he had met, married, and fathered children with an African American woman.

Ada Copeland, born into slavery in Georgia, knew him only as James Todd, a black Pullman porter, whose work kept him away from home for long periods. The thoroughly researched book Sandweiss has written about them is a fascinating portrayal of post-Civil War social history.

It uses a personal story to illuminate almost a hundred years of race relations in America and the shifting legalities of the color line. Most amazing was King’s ability to pass in 1888 as a black man. In spite of his skin color, he need claim having only one black ancestor. Such was the one-drop test of white racial purity.

Clarence King, director USGS, 1879-1881

Success and distress. Were it known, of course, Clarence and Ada’s union would have scandalized not only his upper class social world, where his closest friends included John Hay and Henry Adams, both prominent figures in Washington. It would have been a blow to the professional prestige he had attained.

By the age of 30, he had been recognized as a brilliant surveyor of the mineral resources of the now-opening West. After successful expeditions well funded by the federal government, he proposed and, in 1879, was named head of the U.S. Geological Survey.

It was a secret marriage that lasted only a dozen years. King died short of his sixtieth birthday of tuberculosis, revealing to his wife only his real name but little else. A promised trust fund for herself and four children never materialized, as King died penniless and in debt.

The irony of his life was that he was the sole supporter of yet another family: his aging grandmother, his mother, and half-siblings, one of whom was in an institution for the mentally ill. While a highly respected scientist, he was unable to convert his expertise into a commercial enterprise, and he was the victim of failed investments.

Meanwhile, he kept up appearances in the social whirl of New York and Washington and was much admired for his intelligence, his wit, and a kind of Gilded Age manly grace. It was only a continuing flow of loans from his friend John Hay that kept him afloat. After he died, it was John Hay who secretly continued to provide for Ada and her children.

Pullman porter and passenger, 1880s

East vs. West. Early western novelists complain almost in unison about the corrupting influence of the civilized East. King, who spent time in both East and West, held the belief, along with other western writers, that western life was much healthier.

Its chief benefit was the absence of stress produced in an urban environment. The challenge of roughing it also helped a man recover his manhood. The so-called “camp cure” helped men toughen up who otherwise languished and succumbed to anxieties while confined in the congested cities of the East.

King thrived on the western expeditions, though he stopped short of giving up all his creature comforts. Instead of clothes suited to the open air, he dressed in his finest and kept a servant at his side – always a young black man. He also professed to being charmed by the women of color he found in the West, who seemed sensual and voluptuous by comparison with the stiff, shallow white women of his class back East.

King lived in residential hotels. Fifth Avenue Hotel, 1886

Color lines. King was of the opinion that a true “American race” would result from racial blending. The bitter differences between North and South that followed the war would be resolved in the growing dominance of the racially diverse West. (He called this process “amalgamation.” It was a neutral term already being replaced by “miscegenation,” a slur-word devised by racial purists.)

From a family of staunch abolitionists, King saw the growing anxiety around racial intermingling take the form of segregation and anti-miscegenation laws. These had their proponents in the North as well as the South. His own children in New York were barred for a time from attending a whites-only school.

Reading Sandweiss’s account of these years, it’s easy to recognize assumptions about race and color that show up in early western novels. Written for a white audience, they are often flagrant in their racial prejudices and stereotyping. Crossing the color line happens rarely, though with melodramatic effect, as in Zane Grey’s Heritage of the Desert (1910), where the hero falls in a big way for a half-breed woman.

King used Brooklyn Bridge to cross to Ada's home (1892).

Wrapping up. Sandweiss is a historian. She stumbled across this story in her other research and not until looking at census records did she (or maybe anyone) discover that King had kept his marriage secret by passing for black. A major undertaking, the book has four pages of acknowledgements and 45 pages of notes, plus an extensive index.

As a personal story, her book has a strong emotional pull. Today, when the secret lives of public figures are cause for one exposé after another in the press, reading this story is something different. It is finally unutterably sad.

By all accounts Clarence King was a principled man who lived for others. Cherished by his friends, admired and respected in his profession, he was undone by a world that denied him the simple right to marry and live openly with someone he loved.

His is also an object lesson in the psychological toll of living a double life. The emotional stress of maintaining a façade in both his lives, while confiding in no one, required him always to be living a falsehood. This daily undermining of his own sense of personal integrity, compounded by duties, obligations, and financial problems, finally broke his health. He suffered both mental and physical breakdowns.

John Hay (1838-1905), by John Singer Sargent

His is a telling story to set by that of a contemporary, the flamboyant Charles Lummis, another champion of racial equality (his biography reviewed here recently). Still, Lummis never let the ill opinion of others stand in the way of his own self-indulgence. Though married, he seems to have easily excused his sexual indiscretions.

Meanwhile, the door was open to one and all at his home, where he loved to entertain and play host to the celebrities of his adopted hometown, Los Angeles. He was a self-styled public figure in a city that seems always to have thrived on publicity.

King seems almost innocent by comparison. To have a home, it had to be in secret, where not one of his many friends was ever entertained. There was no blending here of his public and private life. To have the private, intimate life he yearned for, he had to become a stranger to all who knew him – and arguably to himself.

Martha Sandweiss is also the author of Print the Legend, reviewed here recently. Passing Strange is available at amazon and Abebooks.

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons 

Coming up: Willard Wyman, High Country

Richard Leacock (1921-2011)

Richard Leacock, 2009, photo by Teemu Rajala.

I am writing a few paragraphs today in memory of Richard Leacock, the British-born documentary filmmaker who died this week in Paris. Leacock was a pioneer of a kind of film making called cinema verité, or direct cinema. When hand-held 16mm cameras and fast film made it possible to shoot real-life unstaged, unscripted, as it happened, he was there reinventing the genre.

One summer in the 1970s, I took a filmmaking course from him. A few years yet before camcorders, he had us using a synch-sound system that he had developed using Super-8 cameras. I made a little film about a flea market. It’s on a reel of videotape that’s probably still around here somewhere in a closet.

We watched a lot of documentaries that summer, too, and I thank him for opening my eyes to this form of storytelling. Maybe more than anything, he made me aware of the camera’s presence in any shot of a film, as well as the editor selecting and placing each of those shots into a particular sequence.

TV reality before reality TV. In the early days of American TV, people like Richard Leacock were making documentaries that are now considered classics of realism. They were the original reality TV, and much more deserving of the term than the crap that goes by that name today.

Photo, Michael J. Owens

Documentary has evolved beyond cinema verité, though Frederick Wiseman still works in that style and honors the tradition. Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence (2006) is another powerful example. Meanwhile, the Maysles Brothers’ Grey Gardens (1976) has had renewed life as a stage play and as an HBO movie.

What this all makes me think of is the over-mediated world we live in. There’s always someone telling us what we’re supposed to see and hear, interpreting events for us. [Insert Anderson Cooper here or just about anyone else with “news.”]

Leacock simply followed people with a camera and a sound person and captured whatever there was to be seen and heard. He didn’t ask questions; he didn’t explain what we were seeing. There was no music track to cue emotional reactions.

If reality was ambiguous, then so be it. He trusted us to make our own sense of his films, think for ourselves, and come to our own conclusions. Watching this kind of documentary, you have to pay attention. This is an ability that is diminished by disuse. His films show us that there’s more for our eyes and ears at any moment of a day than we can hope to understand in a lifetime. We need to be reminded of that. Often.

The video below begins with a sequence from Leacock’s 1964 film Republicans – The New Breed. It’s followed by a TV interview in 1973 in which he talks about his early years as a filmmaker. This is the man I remember. (The sound is a little out of synch, but it's worth ignoring that.)




Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons 

Coming up: Martha Sandweiss, Passing Strange

Photo-finish Friday: Signs and portents

This road sign in Riverside, California, turned out to be prophetic. The news came on Tuesday. I seem to have a torn rotator cuff, which accounts for a sore shoulder I've had for six weeks.

The physical therapist says he thinks we can get back to normal again without surgery. So doing the prescribed PT routines is my new religion, along with ice compresses and arthritis strength Tylenol. Wish me luck with this.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Frederick R. Bechdolt, The Hard Rock Man (1910)

Poster, 1890s. Artist, Edward Penfield

Here’s another forgotten book from 100 years ago. This one, by Frederick Ritchie Bechdolt (1874-1950) seems to have begun as a short story “The Hard Rock Man,” appearing in The Saturday Evening Post in November 1908. Then a serialized novel named after its main character, Tom Morton, was published in The Saturday Evening Post, May-June 1910. That same year, The Hard Rock Man came out in hard cover.

Bechdolt was a prolific writer, with more than a hundred stories and novels in various genres, starting in 1906 and lasting into the 1940s. He had an education from the University of Washington, and in his early years worked as a journalist for newspapers in several Western cities.

Maybe I’m just going tone deaf, but these early novels set in the West seem as well written as many books today. The Hard Rock Man has a nice balance of character and action, and it brings a little known world to life. It also has something to say.

Iron Mountains, Washington. Farwestern photo by Gregg M. Erickson.

Character. Like other novels of the period, it wants to say something about the growth of character in a man. In this case, the man is a young Irish immigrant, who has fetched up in the mountains of the Northwest, working on a railroad tunnel project.

Modern immigrant literature, like Dinaw Mengestu’s novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, questions the myth of the melting pot. It embraces America, but with mixed feelings. Bechdolt’s Tom Morton represents the more traditional immigrant story.  He quickly adapts to the New World, rising gradually from a lowly unskilled laborer, shoveling muck at the mouth of the tunnel, to boss of operations.

He accomplishes this chiefly out of sheer physicality. He is big, strong and fearless. When five fellow workers gang up on him, he beats the crap out of them before stopping a bullet that hardly wounds him. Graduating to jobs with more responsibility, he eventually is in charge of one of the heavy drills pounding into the hard rock inside the tunnel.

Robert Olmstead, Far Bright Star

As I read this book, I thought of the many pulp fans and writers getting their “education” here in the blogs. Olmstead uses the dark material of pulp fiction and remixes it as chilling poetry. Think of a meeting between Jim Thompson and Ambrose Bierce.

Set during the Mexican Revolution in 1916, the novel centers on a detail of mounted American soldiers in northern Mexico. Once again the U.S. Army is in full force south of the border. This time they are after Pancho Villa, following the rebel leader’s nasty cross-border raid in Columbus, New Mexico (which you can read about here).

At the opposite end of the spectrum from flash fiction, Olmstead writes with the deliberate patience of a raptor waiting for a kill. The slow unfolding of the story reflects first the stifling heat under the desert sun and the blinding boredom of the soldiers’ routine – then the moment by moment grisly fate that awaits them.

Pancho Villa Expedition, infantry columns, 1917

Plot. In the single day that much of the novel takes place, Napoleon Childs is the commanding officer of a detail of mostly inexperienced men. Their job is to find and kill a half dozen wild cattle to be slaughtered for Army rations.

Childs is as hard-boiled as they come. He knows nothing but the life of a career soldier and has an easy contempt for any man whose courage is less dependable than tempered steel. He’s well aware that there are few men like himself. The one exception is his brother, who serves with him. The bond between them is one of blood, muscle, and undying loyalty.

On the day in question, it is Napoleon’s luck that the men under his command include three unseasoned and poorly disciplined men. Only one other is a hardened soldier he can count on. The fifth is no more than a boy.

Far from camp, they discover that they are being surrounded by enemy, and after a long pursuit through a whirling sandstorm, the men make a stand in a canyon. The violence that ensues is described at the same slow-motion pace, and it is horrific. You soon get your fill of it, and yet it is far from over.

Napoleon is taken captive, fully expecting to die in an ordeal of humiliation and torture. And rest assured, I’m glossing over the details. Olmstead’s is an imaginative world of extremes, yet thoroughly grounded in this one. It is pulp fiction with real rather than stylized violence.