Favorite Ozarks Books – 14

Tags

books, Buffalo, columns, Cornerpost Press, essays, Favorite Ozarks Books, Jim Hamilton, newspapers, Ozarks, reviews, rural life

This review first appeared in Elder Mountain.

The newspaper column is a surprisingly difficult genre: strict word count limits, inflexible deadlines, and the necessity to be both original and familiar to a broad spectrum of readers. Jim Hamilton is a master practitioner of the form. For more than forty years, he wrote columns for the Buffalo Reflex, and a collection of his early columns, River of Used to Be, holds a valued place on my bookshelf. Now comes a new collection, Ozarks RFD: Selected Essays 2010-2015, taken from the most recent decade and published by a new press.

Readers of a certain age will remember when writing a newspaper column was a prestigious perch reserved for those who had proved themselves to be exemplary reporters and writers. On the national scene, Mike Royko, Molly Ivins, Jimmy Breslin, and others swayed political debates. In the Ozarks, Jean Bell Mosley and Thomza Zimmerman, Leonard Hall, and Sue Hubbell reported from their homes and farmsteads on the rhythms of life in nature and community. Hamilton’s columns are in that vein – observant, nostalgic, rarely offering comment on current events.

That doesn’t mean they are shallow, though. The columns regularly steer through emotional shoals. Hamilton writes with painful honesty about losing a wife to cancer and a daughter to a car crash, and about the more general disasters that befall a nation and a community. Faithful dogs and treasured fishing holes inhabit these pages, but so do wars and calamities.

I suspect, though, that the columns most readers will respond to are his reminiscences of childhood in the Ozarks. Hamilton has a gift for memory that reveals itself through precision; the word pictures in these columns are detailed, vivid, and evocative. Perhaps one of the signs of love is noticing, and if that’s the case these columns are just about as loving as one can get these days. Jim Hamilton seems to have noticed, and remembered, everything that ever happened to him.

Is there repetition among them? Sure. One of the pitfalls of a newspaper column is the obligation to produce material on deadline, again and again, week after week, and no columnist escapes the repetition trap forever. But even when he’s returning to a familiar subject or theme, Hamilton finds a way to approach it in a different way, shedding light from a different angle. Still, as with all collections of columns, these are best read in modest amounts. A newspaper column is literature in bite-sized form; as with all bite-sized things, they are better enjoyed when consumed at a moderate pace.

Hamilton’s columns capture a moment, dig deep into a memory, analyze an emotion. Each column is a finely crafted exploration of an experience or recollection, and although you can see their origins in the deadline-driven world of newspaper production, they transcend those origins and offer us lasting insights. There’s both sweetness and precision in these columns, a combination that is hard to pull off and even harder to sustain. This collection of work is a real joy.

Jim Hamilton

Favorite Ozarks People – 16

Tags

art, craft, craftsmanship, Favorite Ozarks People, Ironton, Isla Armfield, Mountain Echo, printing, Richard Armfield, Wilbur Larkin

After my family moved from Fredericktown to our farm on the Black River, my mother wrote freelance articles for the Mountain Echo in Ironton, which was then owned by Richard and Isla Armfield. They were a lovely pair or people, old-fashioned newspaper folks down to their toes. Richard suffered from Parkinson’s disease, which ultimately led to their selling the paper, but when I knew him he just walked with an odd gait and showed a minor tremor in his hands. Isla was an elegant dresser and extremely cordial, who was engaged in all sorts of community groups.

But the person I’m thinking about today was one of the back-shop guys, a printer named Wilbur Larkin. Sometimes when my mom traveled to Ironton I would accompany her, and I always found myself drifting into the back shop to watch the printers work. Although the paper was printed elsewhere, the Mountain Echo had a thriving job printing business, with Wilbur and another gentleman whose name will occur to me as I continue (I hope – I think it was Kenneth, but can’t be sure).

Wilbur was the master of two machines. One was a Linotype, an honest-to-goodness Linotype, which fascinated me to no end. I remember the distinctive, horrid smell of molten lead that emanated from the machine when Wilbur fired it up; there was a container on top, where he would toss in some lead blanks and whatever waste pieces of type were lying around from previous jobs, and once the lead had melted properly, he would set the font size and line width and then begin typing the new job on a weird keyboard that bore little resemblance to the standard QWERTY keyboard used by everything else. Lead would run down a little channel and be formed, letter by letter, into a line of type (thus the name), which would then be ejected into a receiving rack on the side. I was always warned to keep my hands away from the finished product, because as you can imagine, it stayed hot for quite a while. It was like watching a cathedral organist at work: intense, concentrated hand movements on an oversized apparatus, incomprehensible to the casual observer.

By Unknown author – Popular Science Monthly Volume 40, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12205750

The other machine was a platen press. This one was electric, although there was a treadle-operated one elsewhere in the shop. Wilbur would daub a paddleful of ink (also strictly do-not-touch) onto the platen, then gradually accelerate into the on-off rhythm of placing a sheet of paper or posterboard into the frame in the moment of open space when the inked lettering was retreating from contact while simultaneously removing the newly printed sheet. Left hand out, right hand in. It was beautiful to watch, made even more so by the fact, repeated to me more than once, that despite the gentle, musical clanking of the machine, any finger that happened to be between paper and type at the moment of printing would be crushed. The platen press was mainly used for posters, and Wilbur kept several composing sticks hanging on the wall in which he would set the type; for the largest sizes, display type over an inch tall, he actually used wooden letterblocks instead of metal ones. I marveled at the cases of two- and three-inch type from which he would pluck the needed words: the number of letters was limited, so if your poster was something like “Massasoit for Assessor,” it might require two passes on the printing press so that the s’s could be reset onto the second line. Years later, I found a couple of job sticks and a type case at a garage sale; I bought them and still have them as souvenirs.

Wilbur was a soft-spoken man who didn’t seem bothered by my presence but didn’t exactly encourage it, either. But he tolerated me, let me watch, and answered my questions with patient good humor.

Few things in life are as satisfying as the sense of mastery: of a subject, a challenge, a tool, an activity. It’s always thrilling to watch someone who’s a master: I think that’s part of the reason for the popularity of professional sports, watching people whose skills are so clearly at a peak. But mastery takes many forms, all of which deserve honor. We tend to associate mastery with physical skills and to bemoan their diminishment. To some extent, that’s true; there’s aren’t as many master saddlemakers or quilters as there once were. But we shouldn’t overlook other forms of mastery. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to watch other masters, digital masters, at work, with design programs, data management programs, and others. And the speed and assuredness with which they work is just as thrilling to me. It’s just as amazing to watch over the shoulder of someone who’s creating a unique design on screen as it was to watch my dad peer into the innards of malfunctioning hay baler out in the field and diagnose its problem within a few minutes, or to watch Wilbur Larkin perform a sonata on the Linotype.

The Industry

Tags

CAFO, Drury University, economics, factory farming, hogs, Hurricane Florence, Ozarks, Paytons, rivers, rural life, Smithfield, Springfield, Taum Sauk, Todd Parnell

Occasionally on my drives through the countryside I’ll come upon a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (or CAFO), which is the “agriculture industry” name for what most of us call a “factory farm.” The first ones I encountered were big turkey and chicken operations in southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas, and of course there have long been the massive cattle feedlots in the western states. About twenty-five years ago I went to a protest for a big hog factory near Unionville, a protest that like many had no effect. The hog operation went in, one of about 500 such operations owned by Smithfield Foods, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the WH Group of China (that’s a picture of it above).

CAFO is a term that has been created in large part to sanitize the image of these operations; “factory farm” is a bit of a misnomer itself because they in no way resemble a farm. “Animal factory” might be a better phrase, but since “factory farm” is in more common use, I guess I’ll stick with that. Factory farms tend to hit the news when there’s a big failure; the disaster that happened in 2018, for example, when Hurricane Florence overwhelmed North Carolina, sending waste from the many factory farm lagoons in that state into rivers and streams. But for the neighbors to factory farming operations, the ill effects don’t need a disaster to be triggered. They happen every day, in the form of dust, contaminant leaching, and overwhelming odor.

I’ve not met Todd Parnell, the recently-retired president of Drury University, although his novel Pig Farm has been on my to-read list for a while. As it turns out, Parnell is also a clean-water activist, and recently someone directed me to his blog, River Rant. I’ll add a link to this blog on my sidebar for easy access. What prompted this direction was his most recent post, in which he describes the unsuccesssful efforts of some environmental activists to get the Springfield, Mo., City Council to pass a resolution criticizing a law passed by the Missouri legislature in its last session. That law prohibits any local government – a county commission, city council, or whatever – from enacting a health regulation on factory farms that is more stringent than state law. Given that the current Missouri legislature is, for all practical purposes, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Ag, it’s easy to envision the level of regulation they intend.

Parnell’s activism has focused on protecting Ozark streams, rightly so, since that’s his location, and since the degradation of Ozark streams is highly visible and psychically devastating. So far, the only large-scale, long-term disaster I can think of on an Ozark stream has been the 2005 collapse of the Taum Sauk reservoir, which wiped out Johnson Shut-Ins State Park for several years, caused about a billion dollars’ worth of damage, and turned the East Fork of the Black River into a muddy blob for quite some time.

Photo by Jeff Spooner, U.S. Geological Survey

There’s also the continuing concern over the oil storage tank farm at the headwaters of the Eleven Point River at Willow Springs, which earned its owner a slap on the wrist from the EPA in 2017.

But sluggish and muddy waters deserve our concern, too. Like most Ozarkers, I’m subject to clear-water bias; one of the important lessons I took away from Leland and Crystal Payton’s book Damming the Osage was that activists who opposed Truman Dam faced more difficulty because the Osage at that location was not especially “scenic” in the traditional sense. Unlike the uproar over the proposed damming of the Current, Eleven Point, or Meramec rivers, those opposed to the damming of the Osage couldn’t draw on the emotionally powerful images of lonely canoers, crystalline springs, and hidden caves. And thus we have Truman Lake, gradually silting up in its western arms, while the other rivers still flow free.

But back to the most recent act of the legislature and governor to shelter Big Ag from local regulation. The degradation of rural America sometimes happens in dramatic and visible ways, a hurricane or a dam collapse; but more often it happens invisibly, incrementally, through tax policies that cause neglect of essential infrastructure, ideologically-driven decisions that lead to the closing of hospitals and clinics, and laws like this one, which give large companies free rein to override the concerns of the communities where they locate. Apologists for Big Ag often resort to the “farmers feed the world” line, a classic example of the either/or fallacy, as if productive farming can only happen in a regulation-free environment.

These people invariably refer to farming as “the agriculture industry,” which reveals their underlying mentality. Of course, industrial methods have been used in farming ever since the Industrial Revolution began, and horse-drawn machinery was replaced by tractors. And farming can be a pretty noxious enterprise, even under the best of circumstances; ask anybody who grew up near a mink farm. And I resist the impulse to call farming a “way of life” as a contrast to an “industry”; that phrase has a fragrance of nostalgia that doesn’t sit right somehow. I think of farming, or agriculture if you will, more as a significant element of the rural economy and culture – not the only element, to be sure, and not an occupation that has a magical power that would free it from all oversight – but certainly something worth cherishing and guarding. And a factory farm is not a farm, but a factory.

 

 

Remembering Robert E. Smith

Tags

art, Crystal Payton, Leland Payton, poetry, Robert E Smith, Springfield

Several years ago, I posted a reminiscence of Robert E. Smith, a unique character and “outsider artist” with an unmistakable painting style and a sensibility that was nearly impossible to categorize.

I didn’t know this at the time, but it turns out that my fellow Ozarks writers Leland and Crystal Payton had a much longer and closer relationship with him. They recently posted some thoughts about him on his birthday, on their website, HyperCommon. Here’s a link. They also posted a link to a profile of Smith that they published in 1993, which contains many of his insights and comments about his artwork. Here’s a link to that one.

May they continue to flourish, the outsiders, the uncategorizable, the eccentrics and the oddballs. What a drab world it would be without them!

Patriotic Songs – 6

Tags

marches, memory, music, patriotic songs, South Iron High School

When I was in high school, our music teacher for a couple of years was an intense, strange, rather scary man who was also a preacher of some sort. Looking back on it now, I think there might have been something genuinely wrong with him. He had very little emotional control, losing himself in rapture at the music we were playing (or the version that was playing in his head, anyway; we were not particularly musical) or flying into fits of rage whenever kids got under his skin, which was often.

This teacher had two musical passions: old-time gospel music and Sousa marches. He selected far more gospel music than was appropriate for a public school, even in those days, and would close his eyes and sing in bliss as we squawked out the tune. Even the pious among us probably realized something was off about the level of his religious fanaticism as we marched down the street at the regional band festival playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” But Sousa marches! Now there was something we all could embrace, even the rowdy saxophonists who otherwise lived only to torment our unbalanced band director with sotto voce sarcasm. The teacher’s favorite was the “Washington Post March,” which you don’t hear as much nowadays, but we students preferred the one that you will undoubtedly hear today, July 4, if you watch a fireworks show, listen to an Independence Day concert, or simply keep your ears open as you hit the stores: “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“The Stars and Stripes Forever” is written in military march form, in which separate sections called “strains” can be repeated, recombined, and re-sequenced to meet the needs of the situation. If the band is actually marching, for example, the first and second strains can be repeated as many times as needed until the band reaches the reviewing stand, at which time the leader will undoubtedly head for the famous Trio/Grandioso strain that finishes the march, the one we all remember with that crazy piccolo flying up into the sky.

John Philip Sousa, the march’s composer as well as its popularizer, was not just a fine musician and composer; he was also a shrewd businessman. He recognized the potential of recorded music very early and made sixty recordings with the Marine Band during his time as its leader, bringing fame to the band and to himself, before leaving it to start the Sousa Band. Although Sousa was known as “the American March King,” the Sousa Band was emphatically not a marching band; our friend Wikipedia records only eight times that the band actually marched during its forty-year history. The Sousa Band can be found performing at practically every notable event and celebration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where it performed at the opening. By that time “The Stars and Stripes Forever” had become one of its signature pieces, as it was practically an instant hit after its composition in 1896-97.

Sousa also wrote lyrics for the march, although I’d have to describe them as unremarkable. They’re full of patriotic sentiment but not especially original; lots of “the gem of the land and the sea” going on here, filling out lines to match the tune. If you grew up watching Mitch Miller on TV, as I did, you’ll remember the nonsense lyrics better. “Be kind to your web-footed friends . . . ” What makes “The Stars and Stripes Forever” memorable is its grand and stirring music, and that’s all right. We don’t always need words to make us feel patriotic.

Speaking of patriotism, after that band director got fired or left on his own (who knows which?), the school hired a young music teacher, fresh out of college, who actually knew a thing or two about music and played a mean trumpet. He had gone to college after serving in the Army, where his trumpet skills had earned him an assignment to one of the several music ensembles that the Army maintained to entertain troops, play at events, and generally put forth a more humane face to the world than tanks and machine guns. And thus he had found himself out of the line of fire during that time, when the Army was engaged in a full-scale war in Vietnam. I remember him telling me as graduation approached to keep practicing my trombone in case things went sour and the draft was reimposed. “You’ll want to play that horn, trust me,” he said, or something like that.

 

 

 

Favorite Ozarks People – 15

Tags

Bill Knight, Fredericktown, libraries, memory, Ozark Regional Library

I have a distinct early memory of the Fredericktown branch of the Ozark Regional Library. When I was a kid of nine or so, I was a frequent habitué of the library, partly because my mom worked there part-time and partly because I was intoxicated with the rows and rows of books, an infinite amount of knowledge or so it seemed, free for the taking. (They also loaned out other things, of course, and I remember showing up at the checkout desk with a couple of full-sized art prints only to be turned away because such things were reserved for grownups. I have no idea what I intended to do with a couple of framed art prints.)

The day I am remembering came after I had discovered the juvenile historical fiction of Joseph A. Altsheler, a popular novelist of the early 20th century whose books were fat, action-filled, and intensely romanticized. In theory, these books were way beyond my reading level; I had to creep out of the kids’ section and into the “teen” section to get them. But I gobbled them up like an addict. So I loaded up my usual week’s supply – three or four books, I would guess – and headed for the checkout desk.

The clerk at the desk took one look at me, with my head barely clearing the counter, and the stack of five-hundred-page books in front of her, each branded with the tell-tale “J” on the spine (instead of the “Y” books I was properly entitled to), and then looked at her co-worker at the desk. Something unspoken passed between them, and she stamped all the books and handed them back to me.

That was when I first recognized the possibility of libraries. A library can turn the most ordinary of transactions into an unexpected opportunity. Its very existence is a statement that doors are never fully closed and that thoughts are ultimately free. Many of us need to be reminded of these facts from time to time; the recent PBS documentary Ex Libris does a wonderful job of it, and if you haven’t seen it yet you should.

But back to the Fredericktown library, and one of my favorite Ozarks people. I’ve been back to that library several times in recent years, putting on programs, leading workshops, and attending ceremonies (that’s what’s going on in the photo above, my cousin Joe Brewen on the left presenting two copies of War of the Wolf to the library – it’s a history of the U.S.S. Seawolf, the submarine on which our uncle Mike served during World War II). My contact person for all my visits has been Bill Knight, who is the other person in the photo.

Bill has been a wonderful asset to the Fredericktown branch, as a recent article in the Fredericktown Democrat-News attests. He’s curious, humble, open to new ideas, intelligent, and devoted to the best interests of the library patrons. He isn’t alone in possessing these qualities, though; all the people quoted in the article have them as well. But Bill gets to stand out in this post because he has just retired from the library. A celebration was held in his honor Friday afternoon.

Bill Knight epitomizes the values of a library, and I am grateful to have gotten to know him. It’s heartening to know that those ideals I first experienced as a child are still alive and in practice.

 

Chain Migration

Tags

chain migration, cultural geography, German, history, immigration, Missouri, Russel Gerlach

I’ve been re-reading Russel Gerlach’s classic study Immigrants in the Ozarks, originally published in 1976 and now out of print. As you might imagine with any 43-year-old work of scholarship, it has some things I would quibble with, but by and large it’s a fine study and the source of some excellent basic information. I was taken aback, though, at his casual use of a phrase that has taken on harsh political connotations in recent years.

He quotes an earlier work, Wilbur Zelinsky’s The Cultural Geography of the United States, published in 1974:

Once a viable ethnic nucleus takes hold in a given location, chain migration may be triggered. If communication lines are kept open between the new settlements and relatives and neighbors back home, positive information may induce the latter to pack up and follow. In this way, a great many . . . rural ethnic neighborhoods have been expanded.

Nowadays, of course, “chain migration” is used almost as a dirty word in the debate over immigration. I didn’t realize that the phrase had such a long history or neutral use. But a moment’s reflection made me realize that I should not have been so surprised. Chain migration, the phenomenon if not the term, has been the American norm. My own family story is one of chain migration. One adventurous son makes the journey; writes back that there’s opportunity to be had; his brother (my great-grandfather) follows; makes a start; writes home; more family members follow. Most of us, if we look back far enough, are chain migrants.

Sometimes even entire communities were the product of chain migration. As you drive the back roads, you’ll see the evidence of this phenomenon in the names of towns and settlements, some now gone, some still flourishing:

Altenburg

Bavaria

Belgique

Dresden

German

Kiel

Krakow

Rhineland

Swiss

Westphalia

Wittenburg

And the list could go on and on (and no, Japan was not named by a group of homesick Japanese settlers!) Everywhere I turn, I see evidence of chain migration’s effects.

 

I Should Really Stay Away from the FSA Archives

Tags

art, Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Farm Services Administration, Great Depression, John Vachon, Ozarks, photography

A recent inquiry, which I will write about later, sent me to the Library of Congress‘ Farm Services Administration digital archive, looking at images. I’ve posted a few before. This is an amazing archive of photographs by some of the greatest photographers in twentieth-century America. It’s truly a bottomless pit for the curious browser. Here are a few that showed up when I searched the archive using “Ozark” as the filter term:

Children of Ozarks Farmer – Missouri, 1940

Ozark Children, 1940

Ozark Farmer and Family, 1940

Ozark Mountain Girls, 1940

William Stamper and Wife, Who Have Lived in the Ozarks for More Than Fifty Years, 1936

Rehabilitation Client at Spinning Wheel, 1935

 

Map Time!

Tags

Current River, economics, history, Jefferson City, lumber, maps, Ozarks, Poplar Bluff, railroads, Van Buren

My affection for old maps goes back a long way, as any of my longtime friends and family can testify. Maps are fuel for the imagination, and I still use historic maps a lot.

I’ve developed a new talk that I’m ready to start giving to libraries and civic groups – it’s about the timber boom in Missouri that began in the late 1880s and continued into the teens, and the cultural and environmental repercussions of that boom. Needless to say, historic maps play a part. The one shown here is an 1877 railroad map of Missouri.

The solid line is the Iron Mountain Railroad, which had only reached as far as Pilot Knob before the war, but had by 1877 been extended all the way into Arkansas. The dotted lines are “projected” railroads; and by “projected” we can go all the way from “overtly planned” to “wishfully imagined.” I re-read Dee Brown’s classic Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow recently, and it was striking in his research how haphazard the railroad expansion was; if a speculator could get enough backers, then a railroad in that area would be built, regardless of need or connection to existing lines. Railroad mania extended to the local level in the form of county governments that would grant all kinds of incentives to railroad companies, including bonds that would burden the counties for decades afterward when the company went bust. David Thelen’s Paths of Resistance describes many instances of counties across the state that gave tremendous financial assistance to sketchy railroad companies, often assisted by liberal amounts of graft, followed by taxpayer revolts in later years as the bond payments came due. Indeed, some of the incidents of courthouse-burning that occurred in the state during the latter part of the 19th century can be attributed to taxpayers trying to wipe out the county’s tax records in a spasm of felonious retribution. (Other instances occurred because of another type of crime-covering, which I will devote a later post to.)

For the purposes of my talk, though, the item of interest on that map is the projected railroad between Van Buren and Poplar Bluff. In 1877, it was an item of fancy, although lines would eventually be built from Williamsville to Van Buren and from Neelyville (not shown on the map) to Doniphan. But the central development in the timber boom was what became known as the Current River Line, which came in from the west, snaking in from Willow Springs to Mountain View to Birch Tree to Van Buren and eventually to a town that didn’t even exist yet, the timber-milling hub of Grandin. That was the line that opened up the southern Ozarks to the timber boom.

I gave this talk at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City last weekend and was fortunate that Gene Brunk, a longtime forester in Missouri, was in the audience. Gene’s grandfather was a fireman (a boiler-stoker, that is, not a firefighter) at the smaller of the two Grandin mills, and Gene had some wonderful photos and stories to tell.

 

Who Loves Libraries?

Tags

Jefferson City, libraries, memory, The Language of Trees

I do! This photo was taken at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City recently, where I was participating in an author event. My college friend Wade Park showed up, much to my delight!

I’ve done events of all types at libraries all over the state, and elsewhere. A library is one of a community’s greatest resources, a place open to all, where knowledge, entertainment, and connection is free and cherished. I’m an unabashed fan of libraries, and anyone who knows about my upbringing can say I got it honestly. My mother, a long-time librarian, instilled that love in me from a very early age. I remember going to the Fredericktown library when I was a kid and loading up on books that were WAY over my age range. The checkout clerks passed a glance, then sighed, then checked them out for me. (They did, however, tell me that only grownups could check out the art prints that I had under my arm.)

I can hardly begin to list the libraries I have visited as part of my book efforts. Some of the bigger ones have nice speaker budgets, and I always appreciate being invited to talk where there’s a check at the end. But many of the little libraries are scratching by with no spare money at all; I usually give a talk at those libraries for free, or for gas money. Libraries have given me so much over the years that I consider myself in a permanent state of debt to them. Plus, when I visit a library there’s always a chance that an old friend will appear!