Fourth of July--Then and Now

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

Published by the StarTribune

July 1, 1961

   MY SON will be able go get a few rolls of ammunition for his cap gun--if he's not too old to disdain such--and perchance may acquire some sparklers.  But that will be the extent of his Fourth of July do-it-yourself pyrotechnics.  Most kids will be similarly restricted.  

   In the course of human progress, Independence Day has become relatively safe in the fireworks department.  Thirty-eight states have laws so restrictive that the celebrator can do little more than pop his knuckles and in most others there is some degree of control.

   Since we value human life, this is all to the good, but as I ponder my progeny's pallid efforts to mark this milestone in our history, I cannot forget that traffic now kills more people on July 4 than fireworks ever did.

   This doesn't mean I'd want the holiday to be celebrated with the no-holds-barred abandon it once was.  If it were, I'd not permit a child of mine out of the house and would be loath to leave it myself.

   BUT BACK in the boom-boom yesterdays any kid who roamed abroad with nothing more lethal than sparklers or a cap gun would have been judged insane and laughed out of town.  To qualify for the demolition corps you had to stick to firecrackers a minimum of two inches long (usually lighted in the hand), torpedoes which exploded with shattering violence when thrown against a hard surface, and giant crackers the size of stove wood capable of lifting a privy from its moorings.  

   Loud noises frightened me when I was tiny.  Luckily I conquered the phobia.  Otherwise the Fourth of July in Choteau, Mont., where they did everything but burn down the courthouse, would have been intolerable.

   A MAJOR part of the  celebrating was done around the saloons, the kids shooting firecrackers outside while the menfolk got shot within.  On one Fourth that I well remember a bunch of the boys were whooping it up outside the Family Liquor store and Wallace Coffey, a lad who put heart and soul into the observance, tossed a king-size boomer into the entrance of the place just as Ewing Steel, who drove the stage between Collins and Choteau, was coming out.
Ewing was an angular, rough-hewn character who got more mileage out of profanity than anyone I ever encountered.  He was visibly shaken by the blast but after satisfying himself that he hadn't caught fire and was only slightly crippled he rent the air with a string of epithets that scattered the firecracker set like prairie chickens.

   THE LADIES AID always had a picnic in the park featuring lemonade in washtubs, potato salad, watermelon, ice cream and an oration..  There was a greased-pig chase with the winner getting $5 from the Rod and Gun club, a ball game complete with rhubarbs, horse races and usually a rodeo.

   The day was concluded with father officiating at the fireworks ceremonial in the back yard--roman candles, skyrockets and pinwheels.  After it was over, mother put salve on your burns and you went to bed with a sense of completion.

   It was a more memorable day, certainly, to you who lived it, than you'll have next Tuesday, not merely  because you then had the bright-eyed wonder and enthusiasm of youth but because the Declaration of Independence is now more remote in time and we observe it with a more sophisticated calm.

   There are now more diversions and complexities, more worries and more of everything to swivel the mind from simple things enjoyed in a less cluttered yesterday, a yesterday when doing one thing at a time was considered enough.

Copyright 2015 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune

Boobs Can Be a Joy--in Fiction

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

April 29, 1961   

   SOME of the most engaging characters I ever knew were boobs I encountered while reading for fun.  I don't read for fun much any more.  This particular art form is going the way of the taffy pull, the basket social and loafing.

   We don't have the time for it now.  We're too busy wearing ourselves out with leisure-time activity.  We read mainly to be informed.  This is commendable, of course, but we don't even do enough of that.  And if I'd never read for fun I'd never have met Ring Lardner's Jack Keefe, the dumb but opinionated ball player; James Thurber's mousy but imaginative Walter Mitty, or P.G. Wodehouse's befuddled and self-righteous English gentleman, Bertie Wooster.

   Keefe, Mitty and Wooster are not important characters in literatrure.  You won't find them snuggled up in school libraries with Hamlet, David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, Ivanhoe or King Arthur.  They are three fumbling jerks caught in the toils of ignorance and inadequacy.

   I FANCY that most folks of my vintage are familiar with them.  Those who arrived late should get away from the television sets, phonographs, radios, comic books and cars long enough to experience the pleasure.

James Thurber

P.G. Wodehouse

   But they probably won't.  Sustained reading has become rather old hat.  We read in snatches now, 15 minutes to half an hour from magazines and newspapers--and the more pictures the better.  Good storytellers are dying off for want of demand.  The fiction market has shrunk.  The accent is on facts--facts on business, history, defense, delinquency, do-it-yourself hocus-pocus and how to prepare Johnny for life.

   The fellow who reads a book a month has become almost an oddity and among us are those who don't read one a year.  When we do tackle a book it's either because we think it will do us good or because everyone else is reading it and we don't want to be shut out of the conversation.

   WHEN DID you last come upon a book you had to read for sheer pleasure?  Not for the light it might shed on the space race or our drift into materialism but for the laughs it contained?  This joy came to me the other day when "The Best of Botts"** caught my eye.

   I've followed Alexander (the Great) Botts, the Earthworm tractor salesman with the high octane ego and low I.Q., for some 30 years, off and on.  He's never let me down and here was my chance for a sustained crack at him.  I went for the book like a kid for the cookie jar.

   THE STORIES about this indomitable, thick-hided halfwit are much alike.  Bott's fatheaded effrotery gets him into one jam after another but he always emerges triumphant.  As author William Hazlett Upson leads him deeper and deeper into the gumbo, the reader has an absorbing time trying to anticipate the twists of fate that will haul him back to dry land, muddy but victorious.

   If I can get my 12-year-old to sit still long enough,, I'm going to read a Botts story to him and see if he's absorbed even remotely to the degree I was at his age when dad gathered the family around the stove and read Ring Lardner yarns.

   I DOUBT that it will hold his interest, not because my son lacks a sense of humor but because he is the product of a time with different tastes and different values, an era of quickie amusement provided by the flick of a switch.
   But I hope that Botts, Keefe, Mitty and Wooster aren't lost to him forever.  Years from now, I trust, he'll take time to feast on the laughs they provide.  I'm sure he'll regret having waited so long.

William Hazlett Upson

**THE BEST OF BOTTS,

    by William Hazlett Upson

    (David McKay Co.,Inc.,

    $3.95, 241 pages)

Copyright 2015 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Reflections on Paper Collections

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

July 16, 1960

   LET THERE BE no more mention of paper sales for a while.  I've labored long enough to raise funds for youth via old newspapers, phone books, magazines, mash notes and circulars.  The hour has come for repose.

   From the time my son entered kindergarten until his recent graduation from grade school, I lived from one paper sale to the next to satisfy the Robert Fulton school's gluttonous appetite for paper and my son's desire that his class be the top provider.

   It was more than chance, I like to think, that 90 per cent of the time his room did bring in the largest amount, and it would have been only fitting, when he finished sixth grade, had I received a plaque acknowledging my contribution, or at least a nod from the PTA.

Robert Fulton

   BUT THE school paper collections were mere warm-ups for the real thing.  The Boy Scouts are the unquestioned champions.  Not only do the kids learn how to tie knots, pitch tents, fry eggs, identify plants and live in the woods, but by the time they've passed their Tenderfoot tests they are experts at persuading their parents to help rustle paper.

   The troop my son is in--one of the greatest collections of father-son eager beavers I have ever felt out of place with--is going to camp for two weeks in August and is selling paper to partially defray expenses.  The Scoutmaster announced weeks ago that each boy was expected to bring in 40 feet of the stuff--a pile of newspapers 40 feet high, folded once.

   I recognized this as a staggering assignment but determined that my child and I would give it our best.  It was only right that we should.  I am quite a sedentary scouter and definitely not an "overnight" man.  I cannot sleep in a tent, cook on a camp stove or be denied a chair.  But through paper salvage I could partially save face.

   THE GARAGE soon bulged with paper, crowding out the car.  The cooperation of friends was at once heartwarming and exhausting, particularly on our final journey of collection.  At one stop the news of our coming had spread through the neighborhood and we were engulfed.  In the flood, I suspect, were collector's items dating back to the Custer massacre.

   When we hit home port with this last installment of treasure, I set up an assembly line from car to picnic table to garage.  I tied bundles and my son lugged them into the supply depot.  It reminded me of a newspaper mailing room handling the Sunday edition.

   All we needed was the roar of presses and I provided a fair substitute.  I had to keep roaring at my helper because of his maddening way of knocking off to read the magazines.

prized find at school paper drive

prized find at Scout paper drive

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              THE BITTER payoff came when we neared the end of the job.  My wife's prized scissors disappeared.  One moment  I was using them to cut twine.  The  next  moment they were gone like the morning dew, as though whisked away by a  malevolent and unseen hand.

   We searched the grass and we  searched the car and garage, while each accused the other of  dereliction.  Apparently the scissors had been wrapped inadvertently in a  bundle off paper.  We squirreled through several with no luck and then, fatigued and dispirited, gave up. This was the  crowning insult, the final galling reward for dedicated and sacrificial labor.

  But justice  occasionally  triumphs.  Heavy  hearts are  sometimes made light. A few days later, after  we'd made five  trips with paper to the final pickup point,  my son returned  home from  the  loading  job with a blissful smile--and handed me the scissors.


Copyright 2015 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Thoughts on "Being Near the Kids"

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

January 18, 1958

   WHEN you get on the far side of middle age you don't win friends as fast as you once did and you lose them a lot faster.  They have a way of dying or moving to Tucson or Los Angeles or Peoria "to be near the kids."

   Death, of course, is inevitable but moving to strange country is not.  And while the desire to be near your own is natural, to yield to this pull can be folly.

   For the first time in our married lives we failed to have the whole family around during the just-departed holidays.  My wife and I missed the absent ones sorely and chafed at the enforced separation.

   BUT THERE are compensations.  Right now we are steamed up over the impending visit of our son and his family.  They are due in from South Dakota tomorrow and the anticipation of again being grandparents, in fact as well as name, runs high.  But the prospect would not be so enriching if they lived a mile away and had been over for dinner last Sunday.

   The mingling of parents, sons, daughters, in-laws and grandchildren can be overdone and I am content to play patriarch only occasionally.  Parenthood can pall, too, after the accustomed span, and I see no point in striving to continue it after the brood has flown the coop.

   My theory is that once the kids are off your hands you're lucky if they stay off your hands--and so are they.  And while you can't quit being John's father just because he is a father, too, you can and should quit thrusting yourself into his life and perhaps messing it up.

   A FRIEND of mine retired a couple of months ago and in a rosy glow he told me that he and his wife were selling their home and moving out west because their two children lived out there now.

   I hope the rosy glow continues, that retirement will be up to their dreams, bulwarked by close association with their own and the continuation of the old family relationship.

   But my doubts are strong.  The old family relationship has a way of entering a new phase once son and daughter are married and established in their own homes.  Any attempt to superimpose the old setup on the new is futile.  Sad though it is, a son-in-law or daughter-in-law can weary of having you around, doting and kindly though you be, and so can son John or daughter Sue.

   YOU PAY a heavy price when you retire to a strange place, I suspect, even though the climate is mild and the kids and the seashore close.  You cannot take the old neighborhood and the old friends along.  And it's a bit late to make new friends.  The close ones only come with years of living in one place, and with ties of school, church, children and common interests.

   Living close to grown children is insufficient recompense.  The Browns and the Bakers don't live next door.  The community grocery, hardware store and filling station, where badinage comes with the potatoes, nails and gas, aren't around.  The Meades don't drop in.  They are a thousand miles away.

   IF YOU don't think familiar surroundings and faces mean much, go away for a spell and experience the joy of return.  You should get away occasionally, medical friends tell me.  You grow old fast if retirement restricts you to the same old scenes and people and activities and attitudes day after day.

   But I cling to the conviction that the old home should be there to return to as long as you are able to make it on your own, that while you're still on your feet it's too dear to abandon for any reason  whatever, including children.

   MY WIFE and I rate our situation better than most.  Our daughter lives 300 miles to the east and our son 400 miles to the west.  Both are within a day's drive--far enough to make friction unlikely and close enough to nourish devotion.

   And when, in some 14 years , our youngest strikes out for himself, while my heart says it would be nice if he lived around the corner, my head says he'd have greater peace of mind if he didn't.  So no doubt, would we.

Copyright 2015 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Easter Joy Is Curdled by Taxes

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

April 1, 1961

   EASTER should be a season of ecstasy, filled with the throb of spring, returning robins and refurbished wardrobes.  But winter clings to my joints and bile saturates my soul.  I am mad at Uncle Sam, mad at his voracious appetite for money.  What was to have gone into new duds has gone into taxes.  I shall march in the Easter parade with naught but a shave, a shine and a dry-cleaning job and look like a fugitive from a rummage sale.

   BECAUSE choler will not let me go and makes me impossible, I have rejected participation in the egg coloring festivities which traditionally gladden our household at Eastertide.

   I can do little but sulk in a corner, wallowing in misery and the memory of finer yesterdays when the movies didn't have prostitutes cluttering up the screen, when women's hats looked better on the head than in a vase, and when Uncle Sam didn't have both hands deep in our pockets.

   ABE LINCOLN said that he owed everything to his mother.  Were he alive today he'd owe everything to the U.S. treasury.  My mood may pass, but at the moment I'm in rebellion against public servants and yearn to tell them off.  All that restrains me is the fact that telling them off would hurt them little but could make me poor indeed.

   Now I appreciate how my late father felt during the war.  He never grew reconciled to gas rationing.  He was convinced it was a nefarious conspiracy against him personally and refused to see any national need for it.  He lived a mile in the country, had to drive to town daily, and thought this entitled him to a "B" card.

   THE RATIONING board thought otherwise and rejected his application.  Whereupon Pop, in high dudgeon, said he'd show 'em.  He'd put the damned car up on blocks and leave it in the garage until the war was over and people got back their senses.

   He didn't carry through his threat, of course, realizing in time that the rationing board would be able to weather the blow but that he would be left afoot.

   However, I sympathize with his reaction and his resentment at the board.  My impulse, as I stew over the tax figures, is to chuck the forms into the alley, head for the hills, live in a hole, let the tax man find me if he could--and shoot him if he did.

   The flaw in this line of action is that going native would make life worse instead of better.  Beating the tax rap, though satisfying, would be insufficient compensation for lack of groceries, plumbing, easy chair, income and TV.

   Return to the primitive, though, looms as a definite possibility.  We of serious mind ponder a future of higher and higher taxes, higher and higher living costs and more and more restrictions--in the name of freedom and security--with definite trepidation.

   WE CANNOT but wonder how long it will be before this freedom and security we prize will be parceled out exclusively by a paternalistic state and humanity will return inexorably to caveman status because--after taxes--a cave is the only shelter we can afford.

   In this season of hope, wonder and awakening, it's a pity that my view is clouded by taxes, the old gray jacket and pants I'm stuck with, and a suspicion that we're headed for the pit even as we reach for the stars.

   I could be wrong and perhaps I am.  A year hence the sun may be shining and I may feel more optimistic.  By then I may have a new suit and be sartorially ready for Easter.

Copyright 2015 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Top Grades Don't Spell Success

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune 

June 16, 1963

IN THE AGE OF COMPLEX technology we suffer under, there's more premium on brains than ever before. The "A" student is the best hope for the country's future.  He is the best bet to make good after graduation, particularly if a science, math or engineering major.  He is the glory boy.  He is sought after by industry and government.  His starting pay may be higher than his dad's ever was.

   Conversely, the prospects of the "C average" Joe, who has specialized in nothing much but horsing around during his stay within the ivied walls, are bordered in black.  There are few flutters in the audience when he gets his diploma.  Not much can be expected of this easy-going lout.

   So runs the general sentiment.  But don't abandon Joe to mediocrity too soon, even though his IQ is run-of -the-mill.  If he is a well-adjusted, congenial extrovert of engaging personality who thinks he's ready for the big run, he may run faster than his scholarly classmate.  This is especially so if the latter is shy and diffident and snarled up with complexes.  Adversity may claim this lad in spite of his brains.

   PERSONALITY CONTRIBUTES as much to success as brains, maybe more.  He who has both is abundantly blessed but many a fellow gets along very well with a two-cylinder think machine while the one who has brains alone needs to be a genius to enjoy success.

   I'll take the well adjusted, aggressive, confident and socially-minded youth as my candidate for the full life.  If he's an "A" student, fine.  But if he's  merely an average one I still favor him over the shy and stand-offish honor graduate.

   Those in our society who are old enough to start wondering about Social Security benefits can, in fact, recall classmates who got through school by outwearing the patience of their instructors; fellows who went to school mainly for fun and spent more time over pool tables than over their books.  But by some miracle of injustice they became bank presidents, heads of law and insurance firms and leaders in business and politics.

   Chiefly what such poor-student-to-top-executive boys have going for them, I think, is abundant self-confidence and unawareness of weakness.  They think they are good and they get others to thinking it.  They can talk with authority even though without substance, answer questions glibly and easily, and be quite convincing.

   They do not look back.  They do not brood.  They are racked by no what-might-have-beens.  They do not toss and turn in bed and wish they had said this or hadn't said that.  They sleep well and have no ulcers.  For them there are no yesterdays, only beckoning tomorrows.

   THEY ARE TO BE ENVIED, and it's too bad they are so few.  Anxiety is close to a universal affliction, and a major one.  It strikes early.  You see it in the faces of small children who have been slighted by playmates.  You see it in the first days of school.  You want to take these little sufferers in your arms and tell them they haven't been slighted, really, and that their worries are small ones and best forgotten.

   But as they reach for happiness, anxiety will be their portion again and yet again and it may thwart their progress.  Triumph and laughter will be tempered by disappointment and pain.

   It would be great if Joe, the extrovert, could show us how to avoid all this but he can't.  It's something in his genes that he can't share.


Copyright 2015 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of theStarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

An Open Fire Kindles Memories

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

January 16, 1960

   ONE OF the good things about winter in the north country is that it gives you an excuse to enjoy the fireplace.  An open fire spells comfort.  It invites you to take off your shoes.  No tranquilizer pill has yet been marketed to rival it as a relaxing agent.

   You can doze and dream by a fire, forget about time and responsibility, and feel no need for talk.  I never spend an evening at the glowing hearth without wondering why I don't do so oftener.

   THE OPEN FIRE has warmed and charmed men for ages, buffalo hunters and trail riders, cowpokes and pioneers moving west, Indians and adventurers.  I gaze into the glow and am one with Kit Carson and Jebediah Smith and the mountain men.  I'm a kid again, camped in the shadow of the continental divide in Montana, patrolling the ridge by day and sitting around the campfire at night swapping yarns with Vern Smith, the smoke-chaser.

   Or I'm in the kitchen of my parental home, thawing out after skating on the slough, seated by the range with my feet in the oven.

   HEAT WAS NOT an impersonal, taken-for-granted boon then.  It meant chopping wood, carrying coal and hauling out ashes.  It was worked for and prized.  And the stove, though a stern taskmaster, was friend and comforter.  Central heat is far more efficient but I've never felt any such kinship with a radiator.

   None of the houses I lived in as a boy had either a fireplace or furnace.  Stoves were spotted in various rooms but it was always chilly around the fringes and in bitter weather, if you wandered eight feet away from the stove, you were cold.

   The range in the kitchen and a pot-bellied, bowlegged monster in the living room were supposed to throw enough heat to warm the dining room, too.  Occasionally they did.

   THE ONLY bedroom boasting a stove was the one off the bath.  This glowed red on Saturday nights and occasionally at other times when the fastidious felt the need of an ablution.

   I recall once pushing my brother into this throbbing heater when we were snapping towels at each other and horsing around after bathing.  The consequences were considerable and the tragedy chilled our relationship for years.

   Of an evening the family would gather in the parlor, open the door to the stove, gaze at the coals, chomp apples and popcorn and know that life could never be better.

   Or someone would wind up the Victrola and John McCormack would give out with "The Sunshine of Your Smile" or dad would read Dickens or Ring Lardner.

   THE YEARS are many and long but those days defy forgetting.  Simple times and simple diversions--a rite of family fusion in the warmth of a fire.

   Memories of boyhood well up strong and poignantly and I wonder, as I sit looking at the fire which represents all those long-dead fires in the kitchen range and the bowlegged stove, whether my own children will be able to look back on occasions comparably enriching.  They've had a great deal more, of course--but also a great deal less.

Copyright 2015 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.