Favorite Ozarks People – 14

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Arcadia, doctors, Favorite Ozarks People, Ironton, Marvin Menne

The former office of Dr. Marvin Menne in Ironton. Looks like it’s a Goodwill store now, or at least it was when this Google Street View image was taken.

Marvin Menne was my family doctor from the time I was about ten (I tried to find a photo of the good doctor himself, but was unsuccessful–who knew that someone could be that far off the grid these days?) I was a tolerably healthy kid, but had the usual number of youthful ailments and necessary check-ups, so I suppose my medical involvement was pretty typical.

Dr. Menne’s office, as you can tell from this photo, was modest. A small waiting room in front, a receptionist/appointment setter behind the counter, a couple of examining rooms, and then an office and a room for more involved procedures, which I rarely saw the inside of, thank goodness. It was the office of a small-town GP, not far removed from the Norman Rockwell illustrations.

Dr. Menne had a vaguely mournful expression much of the time, the expression of someone who’s seen too many broken limbs and lives. But I recall that even as a child, he would square himself up to me, sit, and listen, until I had told him everything I had to say. Only then would he prompt me with further questions or continue with his examination.

In today’s overheated discussions of health care, we romanticize the small-town doctor, who made house calls, accepted chickens as payment, or what have you. Let’s remember that the modern health care system has resulted in a high level of care, far beyond what my small-town doctor was capable of, and overall health has been improving. Instead of a chicken, today’s poor rural patient brings a Medicaid card. But the necessity of caring remains, and I have a feeling that doctors like Marvin Menne can be found all over rural areas just as in my childhood. With the election of a doctor from Mountain Grove to the presidency of the American Medical Association, this is a year to think seriously about the state of health care in rural America. Here’s a hint: It’s not good.

 

Myths and Mythmakers

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ghost stories, legends, monsters, Springfield, Steve Yates, storytelling, The Legend of the Albino Farm

The Legend of the Albino Farm, by Steve Yates

I finished Steve Yates’ intriguing and inventive The Legend of the Albino Farm yesterday and have been pondering it since. Like all of Steve’s books, it brims with sentences that surprise and descriptions that engage. Its central character, Hettienne Sheehy, compels our attention with her multi-edged personality and lapses into premonitory trance. But at its heart, I think it’s a book about our propensity for mythmaking.

I’ve heard Steve describe this book as a horror story turned inside out, and that’s an apt description. Imagine a horror story in which the focus is on the presumed monster, and in which the “monster” turns out to be nothing of the sort. That’s the situation of the “Albino Farm,” which I am told is a long-standing Springfield ghost story/urban legend about a farm on the northern outskirts of the city. The only monsters in The Legend of the Albino Farm are the townsfolk and rowdies, snoopers and idle curious, who trespass on the farm to get a look at its inhabitants, deface its buildings, and terrorize the old folks.

We make up stories to entertain ourselves, and as a storyteller I honor that impulse. But there’s a dark side to this tendency, which we see in people’s stunning willingness to believe all sorts of wild nonsense without evidence (my Facebook news feed testifies to this) and to construct the worst possible explanation for something we don’t understand. Our love for story is also a love for gossip and ugliness sometimes, unfortunately, and we warp toward the tawdry all too often.

Working on a New Talk

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books, environment, humanities, lumber, mining, speaking, The Language of Trees

I delight in working up talks to give to libraries and civic groups, usually in connection with one of my books. I conduct a great deal of research as I work on a novel, and although that research is not especially systematic or scholarly, I learn a lot about an era and can condense it into an understandable presentation. With Slant of Light, I developed a talk about 19th-century utopian communities; with This Old World, on Missouri during the years after the Civil War.

My new book takes place during the late 1880s, when large commercial interests from the Eastern cities and from St. Louis used the recently-built railroads to extend their reach deep into the Ozarks and set up lumber mills and mines to extract these natural resources. The Ozarks had been logged and mined for centuries, of course, but the industrial scale of this enterprise was new, and the impact—cultural, economic, and environmental—was profound.

Men in a lumberyard near Winona around 1890 (source: National Archives)

So I’m working up a talk about the coming of industry to this hardscrabble, rural landscape, and the changes it wrought on the people. It’s an easy story to cast villains and heroes into, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Rural folk were often their own worst enemies, or willing collaborators, in their conflict with the lumber and mining companies, and those companies themselves were not always the rapacious beasts of our imagining. And the relationship between people and company was not merely conflict or exploitation.

I’ve given talks at so many places by now that I can hardly keep track of them all—libraries, historical societies, Rotary clubs, book clubs, you name it. Every group is a bit different, and no two talks are quite the same.

Favorite Ozarks People – 13

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Bud Schuller, Lesterville, nature, Piedmont, Taum Sauk

Bud Schuller (and me)

I got to know Bud Schuller when I was in high school, and had landed a summer job as a counselor at Camp Taum Sauk up the river from me. I still don’t know how I got that job; I think the owner, George Smith, hearing that I was a farm boy, thought I would be good with the horses, when in fact I have never been fond of horses and was quickly dispatched to other duties. In any event, I got the job, and that’s where I met this guy.

Bud (he acquired that nickname later) was the nature counselor, and while I fancied myself to be woods-wise, I quickly learned that there were people far more attuned to natural world than I was. A devotee of John Muir and Aldo Leopold, Bud went on to teach in the Clearwater school district for many years, imparting his love of nature and appreciation for its complexity to hundreds of young people in the region. And he continued his involvement with the camp, introducing many more hundreds of kids, mostly from the St. Louis area, to the pleasures of life in the Ozarks.

Kids are usually pretty quick to spot a fake, and I think that’s one of the reasons kids always take to Bud. They recognize that he is the genuine article and that his interest in them is real. He’s a master storyteller whose tales are usually about as tall as he is. But there’s always something worth paying attention to in his tales, even if they don’t get it at the time. He’s an indelible personality who leaves a lasting impact, and it was an absolute delight to reconnect with him while I was on a book-promotion trip to Poplar Bluff last weekend.

Favorite Ozarks People – 12

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Arcadia, art, books, Frenzel, Ironton, libraries, literature

Stained glass window by Milton Frenzel

When I was a cub reporter, fresh out of college, many years ago in southern Missouri, I was looking for something to keep my mind active. I started attending a Great Books Club at the Ozarks Regional Library in Ironton, about an hour away.

And although I was a college graduate who had aced a couple of literature courses, and a working writer, Milton and Virginia Frenzel, who led the book discussions, were so deeply engaged with what we read, and on such a different level than most of my college professors, that they changed the way I thought about books for good. They didn’t just study them. They looked at them as living things, argued with them, demanded more from them. And by changing the way I thought about literature, they changed the way I thought about myself. And they weren’t even trying to do that. They were just being themselves, authentically and unselfconsciously, and in doing so opened up a new way of defining myself.

Milton and Virginia were an unlikely pair of Ozarkers: intellectual and urbane, they were among several artists who had emigrated from the St. Louis area to the Arcadia Valley, (others included Robert Harmon and Michael Chomyk). Milton and Bob Harmon designed stained glass windows for the Emil Frei Company of St. Louis, and Milton also painted. As I recall, Milton taught some art classes at the high school, although I don’t remember if he taught there full-time. I think they were largely in retirement by then. Virginia later served on the AV School Board.

That book group attracted some remarkable people, both natives and transplants. I may write about more of that group later. But for now, I’ll content myself by observing that if I ever dare to call myself an educated person, it’s a term that first began to become clear to me in a monthly book group at the Ironton library.

— Another Frenzel window.

 

A New Author

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Goat Boy of the Ozarks, John Mort, novels, Ozarks, Springfield, writing

It’s always a great moment when you discover an interesting author who is new to you. That happened to me recently when I received a book by John Mort, who is not a new author at all, but an established author who I simply had missed.

I should have heard of John Mort before now, but somehow had not. He’s an accomplished writer who lives in Springfield, and who has a bunch of books out that he’s either written or edited. I finished Goat Boy of the Ozarks in the last couple of days and based on that one, I’m going to go looking for more.

The “goat boy” of the title is Johnny Bell, a sixteen-year-old who like most boys his age struggles with authority, his sense of self, and inconveniently frequent erections. But unlike most boys his age, he is the poorest of the poor, parentless, largely friendless, and suspicious of the social-service foster family with whom he is placed, although in his isolation he also leans out for the scraps of affection they offer him as well.

At first I found the title off-putting, unsure whether I was in for some sort of Ozarks gothic story, nature idyll, or what. But when I discovered late in the book what the “goat boy” referred to, it came as an unexpected and refreshing surprise as the book took a turn into the deconstruction of Ozarks genre mythology, an activity dear to my own heart. I suppose one could say that the storyline of the book follows the coming-of-age pattern, but there are other springs flowing through this parcel as well.

The narrative style is curious; it’s a bit jagged, with elliptical moments in which we have to figure out what happened in the interim, but after a while I got used to that method. I could tell I was in the hands of a writer with serious purposes, which gave me all the incentive I needed to persist despite my uncertainty.

After reading Goat Boy of the Ozarks, I plan to seek out more of John Mort’s work and give it a look as well.

Deer Season

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culture, deer, hunting, Reynolds County, weapons

I am of the generation that got a couple of days off school every year for the opening of deer season. I don’t know how many schools in the Ozarks do that nowadays, if any, but it was common practice when I was growing up. For me, though, the opening of firearm deer season still carries with it an air of sanctioned hooky-playing, of hours spent in the woods in watchful silence.

My dad was an accomplished hunter and always took us boys out. I was never an especially good shot, and as a kid didn’t have the necessary patience to be a hunter. I recall one particular year after my restlessness had scared off at least two deer, I asked my dad what they were (meaning buck or doe). His reply, with controlled exasperation, was: “Well, they had white tails.”

Growing up in a hunting culture teaches a different sort of relationship between human and nature, one that can be less romanticized about the beauties of nature, although it has its own romantic notions as well. But it’s part of me, and I recognize that.

Another memory of deer season. The angriest I ever saw my dad get was when a carload of hunters parked on our farm (we were renting it at the time) and started to stroll across the field without asking permission. That was a violation of the fundamental rule of hunting on people’s land, and he confronted them. Their response didn’t suit him; even though we were on our way to church at the time, he wasn’t about to let it go, and things got heated in a hurry. To see that small, gentle man in his Sunday suit getting more and more furious as he robustly cussed out four armed strangers in hunting gear was something to behold, and ever after that we recalled it as “the day Dad got mad.”

The Wayback Machine

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art, books, Ed King, memory, Missouri, publishing, University of Missouri

I had an odd jolt this week when I saw a name in the obits and thought, “That sounds familiar.” I suppose that’s a by-product of aging.

When I was a master’s student, my advisor sent me over to the University of Missouri Press for a class/internship in academic publishing. I suspected then, and still do, that it was some sort of payback, in the “do me a favor, and I’ll send you some free labor” way—I’ve done that myself as a teacher. There were four of us students, as I recall, and our tasks were to proofread, read the manuscript pile, and perform the general publishing grunt work.

Our supervisor was the managing editor, whose name was Sue Kelpe, and she oversaw us effectively, although like managing editors everywhere she had the air of someone who had twenty pressing tasks waiting for her at all times, so our conversations were usually swift and surgical. I had some familiarity with blind proofreading from my newspaper days, when we did it for our major advertisers, so I often took that task. One person would read the proofs aloud while another followed the manuscript; the reader had to pronounce every punctuation mark, every capitalization. Some of my fellow students hated it, but I always found it a weird but calming task, this microscopic tour through the text, although I was never the perfect proofreader because I would usually be revising the work in my head at the same time, cutting extraneous words, replacing dead verbs with live ones.

The director of the press was Ed King, whom Sue treated with respect bordering on awe, and who didn’t deal with us passing lowlies a great deal. Occasionally he would glide through our workspace, exuding distinguished geniality, and exchange a few words. But mostly he was elsewhere, his office or meetings, although everyone knew that the U of M was his press, and the selection, design, and overall feel of the books were his.

So this week I saw Ed King’s obit in the paper and remembered droning on to my proofreading partner in the sunlit space in the press’s offices, and what I learned there about care and precision. And I walked over to my bookshelf to take down a book from that era. I noticed its design—impeccably elegant if a little old-fashioned, perfectly proportioned, a book designed to last—and it occurred to me that no obituary could be as insightful, as honest, or as  honorific as that finely crafted book.

Favorite Ozarks People – 11

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art, Doug Pokorny, education, James Joyce, Ozarks, Piedmont, William Faulkner

Douglas Pokorny

I first met Doug Pokorny shortly after taking my first job out of college, as a reporter for the Wayne County Journal-Banner. Glen Tooke, one of the pressmen at the J-B, told me almost immediately, “You need to meet Doug Pokorny,” so I made a point of it.

What I found was one of the most original individuals I’ve ever known. Doug was born in Chicago but raised in Piedmont, and was at the time the proprietor of a little tavern outside of town called the Deerpath Inn. He and his mother, Georgie, made everyone welcome, from local intellectuals to loggers stopping by for a beer and a sandwich on their way home from a day in the woods. There was often a chess game going on the counter–I quickly learned that his chess skills were way out of my league.

Doug’s curiosity and somewhat unorthodox reputation were equally well known in the area. People brought him trivia questions, math problems, and atrocious jokes, all of which he welcomed with equal delight. But his real passion was language and literature. We had many fanciful nights talking Faulkner and Joyce.

As a result, Doug and I, with the enthusiasm only the young and foolish could muster, started a literary magazine, Ozark Review, with the help of Susan Davis, Spence Lyon, and Mary Frenzel, other literature-loving types in the area. To our amazement, we received grants from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and the Missouri Arts Council, and for a couple of years we published literary (and semi- or out-and-out nonliterary) works from a wide variety of Ozark writers. We held poets’ picnics and found ourselves featured in statewide media.

I returned to Columbia for graduate work, and Doug left the Deerpath to go into teaching. For many years he was the inspiration (and terror) of legions of Clearwater High School English students, who, I suspect, never knew quite what to make of him, and thus let him work his high-energy insanity and allowed his insatiable love of knowledge to infect them. How he managed to survive in the bureaucracy of a school system is a testament to the intelligence of the people within that system!

Now in retirement, Doug continues to learn and to teach in his own way, devouring ancient languages and posting prolifically on Facebook–but his posts, unlike most of our own sadly humdrum concerns, are almost entirely devoted to celebrating the beauties of art, nature, and the human spirit. He inundates my news feed with odd glories gleaned from the corners of the earth. Every so often, a former student posts thanks on his page for having stunned him into an insight in some unusual fashion–whether by reciting the entirety of “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” from memory or by stopping a class commotion by putting the stapler to his own forehead.

Bonniebrook

Tags

art, Bonniebrook, creativity, illustration, Missouri, Ozarks, Rose O'Neill, suffrage

When I attended the Ozarks Cultural Symposium this fall, I got to hear a talk from Susan Scott, the president of the Bonniebrook Historical Society, about the Bonniebrook Gallery, Museum, and Homestead, housed at the former home of Rose O’Neill. Until that talk, I had only been dimly aware of Bonniebrook and Rose O’Neill at all, but I was fascinated to learn about the life of this transplanted Ozarker and to hear the story of how she came to create the home known as Bonniebrook.

Nowadays, this creative, free-spirited illustrator and writer is best known for her creation, the Kewpie. The Kewpie, which began as a cartoon and was later turned into a wildly popular line of porcelain dolls, was one of the first mass-marketed toys in America. But there was much more to the life and works of Rose O’Neill. A prominent illustrator who commanded top dollar for her work, a writer and suffragist, an artist and a supporter of artists, Rose O’Neill lived life on a large scale.

The Bonniebrook Historical Society maintains her home near Branson. It is one of the lesser-known attractions of that area, but definitely deserves to be better known. The season at Bonniebrook runs from mid-April to the end of October, and it begins with an open house and ends with a festival. Here’s the program for their open house:

And their end-of-season festival, The Festival of Painted Leaves, will be October 22. I’m excited to be the keynote speaker for that festival, and will have more to say about it and other October events in the coming months. But for now, if you’re planning a trip to Branson this spring or summer, check out Bonniebrook!