Progress Claims Old Home Town

  By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

May 5, 1963

  I MADE a sentimental journey to my native west last week, met some old friends, made some new ones, and returned home more sad than rejuvenated. Montana wasn't the same. Only the Rockies were the same. Great Falls was a galloping metropolis of more than 60,000, twice the size it had been when I'd left it in 1944.

   Even Choteau had caught the fever. Growth and change had robbed me of my home town and I was a stranger in it. It had cast off its pioneer, placid runtiness and grown up. Its brawling, cowtown past had disappeared. It was busy. It had traffic. You could no longer park with your eyes shut.

   THE OLD-TIMERS had passed on. My contemporaries--and few of them remained--now were the greybeards. The Royal Theater now was the Montana Power Co. building. The old stone grade school had come down, even as the old brick high school had years earlier.

   The shortcut I once took to this latter seat of learning was gone, too. The once unencumbered expanse now contained the town hospital. Our spacious old barn lot was gone. So was the barn. So, in fact, was the house. It had been moved around the corner and, stripped of front porch, now faced south on "Division St." Who would have guessed, back in the stagecoach days, that any street but Main would ever be worthy of a name?

   THE VACANT lots where we played ball no longer existed. There was no clear view of the woods off to the west along the Teton. New houses stood in the way.

   It was the same to the southeast. Years ago the road through this area led to the cemetery. It also now led to new homes and a new church. And further east, on the "bench" were the golf course and the airport.

   My wife and I headed north, after chatting a while with some old friends, and interest quickened. Less than a mile ahead would be the white house my folks had moved into when I was still in high school, the showplace of  Choteau's "suburbia."

   It stood on high ground in  majestic isolation and was our special pride. Meadow and field stretched generously away in all directions. It stands in isolation no longer. It has the company of ramblers--new and attractive interlopers.

   THE APPROACH along the highway to the south was less attractive. It was scarred by a chaotic agony of rubble--shanties, signboards, old trucks and the evidence of an embryo auto graveyard.

   I wanted to stop, take the path through the meadow to the house as I'd done so often long ago, push open the kitchen door and hang my hat in the little closet off the kitchen.

   But, pressed for time, we hurried on toward my brother's place in the mountains. Anyway, the house I knew was but a slice of memory. There was no little closet off the kitchen now. The whole interior had been changed.

   The new ramblers, the country club, the hospital--they all shouted of change--from old languor to new hustle, change from days of abundant time to days of pressing urgency. I dislike having this place of  memory slip away, but one must yield to the inevitable. I don't like to, though, and wish it weren't necessary.

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An Incident Involving a Horse

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial page staff

Published February 25, 1961

   THIS PIECE should be reserved for Own Your Own Horse week, National Saddle and Bridle week or Be Kind to Old Paint week. But I don't know when any of these observances fall and haven't the energy to find out. I have an irrepressible urge to write about horses, however, and one horse in particular.

   Old Fox went to the glue works long ago and was past his prime when Pop bought him about 1910 to transport us about the countryside on Sunday afternoons and for hunting and fishing trips. He was an unpredictable beast and reluctant to pull a buggy unless he was headed home. He could be gentle as a kitten, but had these benevolent seizures only occasionally. His moods usually ranged from mean to impossible.

   IN THIS WAY he resembled his master. In fairness to my sire, however, he was gentle oftener than the horse was. When both got mean simultaneously they created a scene that sent kids and chickens scurrying from the barnyard.

   Old Fox was a flinty-eyed sorrel about 17 hands high. There was a big knot behind his left ear where a previous owner had belted him one with a club. The abuse the old horse got before he came to us perhaps explained his suspicion of the human race.

   Pop didn't let his children ride Old Fox until they'd done their apprenticeship on a buckskin pony which arrived one day complete with saddle and bridle and guaranteed to be gentle. Baldy was gentle to the point of immobility. Due to the infirmities of age he could not be pushed into more than a leisurely walk and unless the rider had the strength to pull his nose out of the grass by the roadside and quirt him diligently he wouldn't move at all.

   Pop finally consented to let my brother, a more daring spirit than I, get up on Old Fox. The horse was on his good behavior, for a wonder, and galloped around the back lot with an air of sardonic amusement. The first time my older sister got on his back, however, he pitched her into the rutabagas.

   THE MOST memorable scene starring Old Fox was brought on by another horse, the fictional "Black Beauty." Pop read a couple of chapters of the book each evening to the family and finally was mellowed into one of the most foolhardy acts of his life.

   Black Beauty made quite a point of the evils of bridle blinders, those leather shields which cut off the wearer's lateral vision. They were a dirty trick, Black Beauty said in effect. A horse had as much right to untrammeled vision as a person. A straight-ahead-only view wasn't enough.

   So Pop cut the blinders off the bridle. The following Sunday afternoon he hitched the horse to the buggy and we all got aboard for the shortest ride in history. It ended almost as soon as it began.

   POP CLUCKED at his charger and Old Fox groaned into motion. Then, out of the tail of his eyes, he saw the buggy following him and exploded. His fright was appalling to behold--particularly to those in the buggy. After a couple of fast trips around the lot, accompanied by terrified snorts, he bucked his way free to our vast relief.

   Then Pop, livid with fury and intent on disciplinary action, grabbed the whip and headed for the horse. Mother restrained him. She said he shouldn't hold Old Fox responsible for something he'd brought on himself. If he insisted on blaming a horse, she said, he should blame Black Beauty.

   Pop saw the point and spared his horse, but he got revenge on Black Beauty. He read no more of the book. None of us had the courage to suggest that he go on with the story.

Copyright 2021 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

   

Neighbor Brown Was a Very Special Guy (A Fellow to Remember)

 By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

June 17, 1953

   IF THEY'D told us when we came here that we could have our pick of next-door neighbors, we couldn't have done as well by choice as we did by chance. For chance gave us Neighbor Brown, a special type of a guy.

   And when a fellow like Mr. Brown goes you don't miss him in a casual way. The loss is sharp and personal because, through the years, you forge a big link of affection for such a man.

   I have kidded Neighbor Brown a few times in pieces I have done, making him out as a lazy lout like me who resisted all physical labors as a matter of principle and who liked to lean on a rake while the womenfolk did the work. 

   He enjoyed being ribbed and I'm glad I ribbed him. It proves somehow that my esteem for him wasn't something suddenly contrived out of tragedy. You don't kid people you don't like. And although we did shoot the breeze a lot while casually tidying up our acreage, he always kept his place neat as a pin, was proud as punch of his super-duper lawnmower, his evergreens and his flowers, and was invariably one of the first in the block to clear his walks of snow.

   FOR EIGHT years we had D.H. Brown for a neighbor, hardly conscious that he was around until it came time to use his ladder or rake or pruning shears. He always was the kind to mind his own business, leaving you alone until you needed him. But get sick or break a leg and you quickly knew the Browns were around.

   Neighbor Brown got a kick out of the simple things. He liked having his son and daughter and their families around. He hadn't owned a car for years. "We talk about it sometimes," he'd say, "But I look at that long driveway and think about all that snow and get the idea out of my head fast." He was tickled pink over a retaining wall we finally built between our back yards, which replaced a rickety fence. A newly installed clothes pole pleased him, too. So did the peonies out by the garage, which he barely lived to see come into this June's glory.

   MR. BROWN never borrowed a thing. He was afraid his request might put you out. It was part of his New England makeup, I guess. He'd spent most of his youth in Maine and so had his wife. They'd lived out on York avenue for 41 years but the stamp of Maine endured.

   Most of his friends called him Dan. But to me he was Mr. Brown. It wasn't in deference to his age. He never let his 68 years cloud his enthusiasm or get in the way of whatever he wanted to do. He wasn't old. But you felt an innate dignity about him, even though he never stood on ceremony, was never stuffy or offish and was fast with a wisecrack.

   He even kept his sense of humor while he lay there at the edge of Xerxes avenue with seven ribs and a collarbone broken and his left lung fatally torn after two cars collided at the Forty-sixth street intersection and careened into him. While people waited mute and tight-lipped for the ambulance, Mr. Brown had a joke when the Rev. Stanley Conover bent over him--something about everything being ready now for the last rites.

   WHEN WORD came Sunday evening that he was dead we knew the neighborhood never again would be the same, never again quite so good. We wouldn't see a tall, angular man striding off to work with a cigar clamped in his teeth. We wouldn't see him shining his shoes on the back stoop or knocking the ashes out of his pipe or checking the thermometer and cracking wise about the weather.

   The neighbors will go to his funeral today to say a last goodbye to a man they could always count on to give them a lift or a laugh. They won't forget him. You don't forget the likes of Neighbor Brown.

Copyright 2021 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune. 

A Vote Against Voting Machines

 By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

November 10, 1956

   FULLY aware that the opinion will have all the force of a snowball hitting a smokestack, I am compelled to join the ill-starred, obstructionist revolt against the voting machine.

   I share the feelings of an old political pro who cast his vote on one of these contraptions for the first time Tuesday.

   "My invariable election day custom in the past," he told me, "has been to tilt back on my head an old derby hat worn especially for the occasion, clench a fat cigar in my jaws, bear down hard on the ballot with a black pencil and exercise my right of suffrage as befits a man of conviction. When you fiddle with those cute little switches on the machine you aren't sure if you're voting or trying to win a package of chocolate creams."

   TO THIS I say amen. The voting machine, somehow, posed a barrier between me and the candidates of my choice. I left the polling place with an uneasy feeling that something had been left undone. I realized later that it was the final business of folding the ballot and ramming it into the box. This tangible assurance of having voted had been eliminated. One had to pin his faith in the responses of something inanimate, hoping that it recorded his partisan feelings in a nonpartisan manner.

   I confess to a certain disquiet when I entered the booth, pulled the lever to close the curtain and found myself alone with my conscience and this complex symbol of man's genius.

   It displayed a column of candidates and row on row of keys. Off in right field, far removed from the main combat, were the three state constitutional amendments which the public had been urged not to neglect.

   I GAVE these my first attention and was caught immediately on the horns of my mechanical ineptitude. There were rows of keys on both sides of these amendments and I sought, with no success, to turn those in the wrong row, which, as I recall, was the left. It never entered my head to try the row on the right. I befuddle easily when pressured by mystery.

   My corrosive anguish finally caught the attention of a poll worker, who set me straight in the manner of a teacher advising a first-grader. I then finished my civic responsibility in a hurry, albeit with cringing embarrassment and a desire for solitude more complete than the voting booth provided.

   My wife said afterward that if I'd had brains enough to take a trial spin before election day I'd have had no trouble. She had happened on a practice machine the previous Friday while shopping, knew all about electronic suffrage and was insufferably superior. That is one of the penalties you pay for not being the family shopper. You don't get around.

   MY PREJUDICE against the voting machine is hard to square with an otherwise broad affinity for progress, which even includes acceptance of the singing commercial and home movies. But I cannot but wonder sometimes where our perpetual striving for better and quicker ways of doing things, featuring radar, mechanical brains, transistors, remote controls and other scientific wonders, will lead.

   The revolution in the kitchen alone provides a fair clue to the new tomorrow. The housewife has to be as much engineer as cook. Meal preparation has become largely a matter of throwing switches, turning dials and setting timers.

   THE VOTING machine provides an even more awesome clue to what's ahead and despite its cold impersonality it is here to stay. We reactionaries, howl as we may, must admit, too, that the machine provides one blessing. It cuts election suspense time sharply. You do not have to stay up beyond bedtime just to be told that Casper McSweeney is leading eight votes to two for congress but these are only fragmentary figures, folks, and do not indicate a trend.

   The machine is now in its primitive  phase, of course. A few years hence it may be expanded to give vocal pitches for cigarettes, automobiles and electric roasters. A fellow receives this bonus now when hearing the returns and he might as well get it while voting. Also this would help defray the cost of the machines.

   It could very well be--though it would take a while--that the time consuming voting process we know today will be eliminated altogether in the rush toward automation. I see ahead the day when aspirants for office are fed into a calculating machine which will yield up the results in a trice. If it fails to yield up the candidates, well--that merely will emphasize the grave hazards  of politics.

Copyright 2021 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.