High School Reunion Thoughts

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial/ opinion page staff

Published by the StarTribune

November 10, 1968

   A CLASS reunion is both sobering and rewarding--sobering because it is a forceful reminder that though time may be a great healer, it also breeds bald heads, bulges, gray hair and wrinkles. It's rewards are obvious. Old schoolmates are fun to see.

Teton County High School, Choteau MT

   I attended a reunion of my high school class in connection with the dedication of a new building. The happening was at Choteau, Mont., and what this town of 2,000 has acquired as an educational plant exceeds the wildest dreams of those long-gone grads who tend to assume that the old town off in the boondocks will never change.

   MORE THAN HALF of those in my class, which numbered less than 20, returned for the reunion. I wouldn't have recognized more than a couple had we met on the street, and some seemed to have difficulty placing me. I afterward expressed amazement at this and the best I could get from my wife was a satirical "How strange!"

   Everything considered, though, the class was well preserved. Nobody walked with a cane, nobody complained of arthritis, nobody was overly stout, and nobody bored his fellows with pictures of, and monologues about, the grandchildren.

   At the reunion dinner, everyone ate with gusto and the conversation, while not always glittering, was adequate. That old one about the absent-minded sculptor even got a laugh, which indicated a praiseworthy resolve to make the best of things.

   Everyone told what he'd done since graduation. In the group were teachers, secretaries, a social worker, housewives and farmers. Some had traveled abroad, one wintered in Florida, and one, who had made a major hobby of photography, told of hunting caribou and white wolves with a camera in the far-north permafrost country.

   After listening to the many colorful experiences, I was numbed into near silence and, when my turn came, could only mumble abashedly about a trip we'd once made to Cape Cod and about how we'd had a hamburger and hot-dog stand during the depression.

Choteau MT 

   But the town and the high school impressed me even more than the reunion. Before landmarks began falling into place I suspected I was in the wrong town. The old stone grade school had been razed and the vacant lot we once crossed en route to school now was the site of a hospital. To further violate memory, a business section had sprung up south of town, where there had once been little but a shack or two and a flour mill.

   AS I LOOKED at the colorful school auditorium and the big gymnasium, I thought of the town's first high school building, where the little second-floor gym doubled as a study and assembly hall, and where the backboards were bolted to the end walls and where, had it not been for the low ceiling, baskets could have been thrown with little difficulty from the center circle.

   But the great thing about returning to the home town after a lapse of years is not the new buildings but the old friends with whom you can chin about an unhurried yesterday--about the pool hall and livery barn, the Saturday night dance and the fishing--and the days rich in time that made urgency an affectation.

   When the visit ends and you leave the old friends, and the town becomes lost in distance--the town you regarded when a boy as the center of creation --there comes a vague emptiness and you wonder how long it will be before you pass that way again.

GUTHRIE

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Politics Knows Little Moderation

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial page staff

Published by the Minneapolis StarTribune

October 11, 1958

   THE DICTIONARY defines politics as the science of government. If this be true it seems obvious that we have too few politicians and too many people who think they are but aren't.

   But if we are short of true politicians, we do have a wealth of vitriol that passes for politics. The seeping and discrediting statement, the insulting slogan, the unsubstantiated indictment--these contribute about as much to the science of government as a gopher does to the science of agriculture.

   SUCH POLITICAL extremes are abundant during campaign years. Issues get lost in the heat of conflict and problems of real importance are sacrificed to prejudice, deceit and bombast.

   It is not enough to say that your opponent or the opposition party is wrong on agriculture, foreign policy, taxation or the race question--and to dispassionately give your reasons for thinking so. You needs must add that your opponent is either a horse thief or a tool of the "interests"or of labor, the underworld or the Commies.

   And if the rival party takes control it will mean turning the country over to the robber barons, the labor racketeers or the socialists. There can be no middle ground,  no sweet reasonableness. Everything is black or white. We shall have abundance never before dreamed of or we shall have chaos. Civilization is at the crossroads, brother, and you had better vote right.

   I CANNOT stomach such tangy tripe. While I can see where a fellow on the stump, carried away by applause and the desire for victory, might be constrained to aim a few below the belt, I don't have to like his tactics or vote the way he tells me.

   Many may have been amused, but few convinced, by recent haymakers thrown by Vice President Nixon and former President Truman. While poles apart politically, they have a common penchant for overstatement and uppercuts.

   Nixon, in an understandably zealous bid to save his state of California for the Republicans, accused the Democrats of "rot gut" thinking. And old Harry, not to be outdone, is going around yelling that the administration deliberately brought on the recent recession. He also pictures the Republican Party as a worse blight to agriculture than hail, flood, drouth or grasshoppers.

   Nixon and Truman may get partisan cheers and be applauded for their fighting spirit, but I see little mileage in such strategy.

   MAYBE I'm wrong. Maybe this has to be done to bring in party contributions. Another argument for it is that the voter, apathetic enough at best, will stay in bed on Election Day unless fired up. There must be implanted in him the suspicion that nefarious forces are working against him and his only defense is to vote. This seems a sad commentary on the electorate. If the voter can't be stimulated through sane debate of the issues, he might better stay in bed.

   I don't think democratic government will grind to a halt or the country be taken over by hoodlums if Joe Doakes wins the election or doesn't. I don't think Democrats are "rot gut" thinkers any more than I believe the GOP is out to hook the farmer.

   I doubt that those who favor right-to-work laws have labor enslavement in mind or that right-to-work opponents are pinks and racketeers or want to deprive anyone of his constitutional right to make a living.

   It would be nice if we had less campaign demagoguery and more campaign sense, fewer pie-in-the-sky promises and more unspectacular honesty, less guile and more forthrightness.

    BUT IT seems too much to expect. Look at the success of that great political opportunist and champion of white supremacy, Gov. Orval Fabus. He won re-election in Arkansas by a whopping margin because he had called out the national guard to prevent a few Negro students from attending Central high school in Little Rock.

   The nation long will pay for the mischief wrought by the little man from Greasy Creek. He has fomented hate and caused confusion, suffering and heartache.

   Still he's tall in the political saddle.

Copyright 2016 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Filling Station Closing Out a Dramatic Run

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial page staff

Published by the StarTribune

October 26, 1969

   THERE'S a filling station at 50th St. And Washburn Av. S., which contains within its modest walls the story of what's right about America--an America of opportunity, an America which rewards hard work and dependability, responds to friendliness and is unmindful of skin color.

   It is the story of Ben and Yuri Esaki, two Japanese-Americans who were caught up in the savage backlash of Pearl Harbor, taken from their West Coast homes and put behind barbed wire and who, by whim of circumstance, came to Minneapolis.

   NOW after 21 years of pumping gas, changing tires, tuning motors and driving tow trucks in all kinds of weather, Ben and Yuri will go out of business at the end of the month and make a lot of customers unhappy.

   They might have remained a couple more years had Ben felt up to it. But his legs were badly mangled and one of them broken last March when he was pinned to the wall by a car. He didn't return to work until July and numbness persists in his legs.

   AND YURI is relieved to escape another winter at the gas pumps. She is a native of Los Angeles. Ben was born and raised in Santa Barbara. They were married on March 12, 1942, a couple of days before their forced departure from the coast.

   But the Ezakis recall the ordeal without bitterness and are grateful for the help Minneapolitans provided. At 50 Ben is happy and affable, a fellow of ready laugh and fast quip. Yuri is a smiling, efficient and shapely charmer whose femininity shines through the occupational smudges.

   BEN TRIED to enlist after Pearl Harbor but was rejected, he laughs, as an "enemy alien" even though a U.S. Citizen. He and Yuri and his parents were quartered for a while in a horse barn at the Tulare County fairgrounds, where accommodations were decidedly primitive.

   Life was better later, but still far from plush, at the Gila River center in Arizona 50 miles from Phoenix. There Ben was put in charge of the mess hall at Camp No. 2 and supervised the feeding of 500 people three times a day.

   Then he was picked as one of 25 Nisei for a training course in Minnesota, sponsored by

 The National Youth Administration, and in May 1943 found himself at Shakopee. Two weeks later, however, orders came from Washington to "get rid of the Japs" and Ben was cast adrift--a stranger in a strange state.

   But fate was kind. He got a couple of weeks' work at Mission Farms near Medicine Lake and thereby made contact with William Stowe of the Minneapolis Iron Store. Stowe and his wife invited Ben to live with them in their North Side home. "He helped me get a driver's license, turned over a set of keys to his car and told me to use it whenever I wished." Such trust of an "enemy alien" was quite a change, and Ben was touched.

   THERE followed a job as caretaker of a residence on Lake Harriet Blvd. Yuri, who had remained at the Arizona camp, where their son was born, joined Ben in August and they lived in a room on Bryant Av.

   Then the Army had a change of heart and summoned Ben for service. This surprise proved a godsend. Ben flunked his physical and was told to see his doctor immediately. He knew he hadn't been feeling well--he had occasional blackouts--and found out why. A goiter was pushing against his trachea and robbing him of oxygen.

   THIS MEANT an operation. So the Ezakis moved into a duplex, Ben's parents were summoned to care for Ben Jr., Yuri got a job and Ben went to the hospital. He was told that recovery from the surgery would take a year but he was pronounced fit in a month.

   He found a job in a filling station and four years later, by virtue of strict economy ("we didn't go anywhere") he and Yuri got the gas station they wanted--with a substantial assist from a loan company.

   THEY opened the station Nov. 8, 1948 and have operated on the theory that the road to success lies through a crowd of satisfied customers.

    The Ezakis have a bond of deep devotion and Ben is quick to credit Yuri. She not only pumps most of the gas and does occasional grease and muffler jobs, but answers the phone, tickets the jobs, keeps the accounts and knows more about costs than Ben does.

   They have a beautiful home at the edge of Bloomington, a home built into a wooded hill with a picture window that looks out on the trees.

   When complimented on the place Ben grinned and declared, "Well, it does beat living in a horse barn."

Copyright 2016 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

   

Running Grocery Store Can Be Fun (Here's the Proof!)

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

Published by the StarTribune

September 26, 1953

   HIS NAME is Joseph A. McClellan but few people know it. Everyone calls this little Irishman Mac--from kids to oldsters. And if you live in the neighborhood of Washburn avenue S. And Forty-sixth street and run out of sugar or bread you don't go to "McClellan's" grocery. You go to Mac's.

   The customers don't go there just for groceries, either. They go there to shoot the breeze. Here is one of the top gab centers of south Minneapolis--a throwback to 50 years ago, minus the pot-bellied stove and cracker barrel. Folks smart off and trade jocular insults with the help and revel in the small-town atmosphere.

   IT'S SAFE to assume that Mac and his wife, both of whom have spent most of their lives behind a counter, are the targets of as many shopworn gags as anyone in town.

   "Be a nice place to start a store,"someone will drawl when Mac is out of a requested item. Or they tell him the scales are crooked or accuse him of playing fast and loose with the adding machine when toting up orders. "Yes, sir, that gizmo was the best investment Mac ever made. Means a big profit with a small inventory."

   But Mac, who is 74 and 155 pounds of spryness, is not slow with the badinage himself. "Where are the shoelaces in this gyp joint?" someone will require. "Up on the mezzanine with the buggy whips," Mac will retort.

   Ask him who his chief competitor is and he's apt to say Sears and Roebuck or mention a loop department store.

   He and Mrs. Mac have been "retired" now for some months, which means that neither spends more than six hours a day in the store. "Try and keep them out of the place," laughs their son Ray, who is now one of the official proprietors. The other one is Jimmy Hart, Mac's son-in-law.

   THE MACS have been on the corner for 42 years, first in a little frame building that fronted on Washburn avenue. Six years later they built the present home-store combination, a brick structure with the store on Forty-sixth street. Before they started the present building the area was zoned for residences and signatures of property owners from Beard avenue to Lake Harriet and from Forty-forth to Forty-ninth streets had to be gained before a building permit was issued. During this hassle one customer handed over an unsolicited $300. "Here, Mac," he said, "maybe you can use this." Mac reckoned that he could.

   Mac has been a grocer for 55 years. At 19 he left his farm home five miles south of Waverley to clerk for F.A. Barth & Son at Watertown.

   Later he managed a creamery for the Hutchinson Produce Co. at Hollywood, Minn. Not long afterward he bought the adjoining grocery store. Then he got married. "So I could have someone to run the grocery while I looked after the creamery," he cracked.

   Their first Minneapolis store was on Nicollet avenue. They sold this after a few months and were at Third avenue S. And Thirty-seventh street for three years before moving to their present location.

   SOME SHARP changes have taken place in the grocery business since then. Mac recalls. "We sold flour mostly in 50-pound bags--never smaller than 25. Potatoes? Why, people used to buy spuds 10 to 15 bushels at a time. I'd get their orders for the winter and when the farmer brought in a load we'd go along and parcel 'em out. A 10-pound sale of potatoes was a joke."

   If the customers now we're just "family" the store would do a fair business. The Macs have six children, 32 grandchildren and six great grandchildren.

   One of the sons has a brood of 12. This group was featured in a series of advertisements for bread last year. When the mother of the flock leaves Mac's with her groceries one might suspect that she was grubstaking an expedition to the Belgian Congo.

   MRS. MAC is six years younger than her spouse and Mac admits that she looks it. You'd swear she was under 60. And the kids who, on Saturdays and after school are always under foot in quest of suckers, bubble gum and pop, never ruffle her. There are normally a couple of bicycles and two or three dogs outside, too, as an introduction to the informality within.

   "Haven't you ever gotten sick of being tied down all these years?" I asked. Mac's round, impish face broke into a grin. "Well, I can't say as we have."

   Mrs Mac put it better. "We both love store keeping."

   They must. The longest they've been away was five weeks--when they went to California several years ago.

   If there's a moral to be drawn here, it must be that toil doesn't hurt you, particularly if you like the work. And it would seem that the "retired" McClellans like it fine--well enough to keep going indefinitely.

Copyright 2016 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

   

   

We Have Too Many Organizations

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial page staff 

Published by the StarTribune
May 23, 1959

   IN THIS country we operate on the premise that organization insures efficiency. In moderation, it does. But when organization becomes an end in itself, efficiency suffers, and innumerable hours are lost that could be spent more profitably in loafing or fertilizing the lawn.

   Over-organization is one of the great time wasters, the great banes, besetting us today. I lack the courage to single out any groups I think we'd be better off without, but duplications are obvious. We are hip-deep in luncheon clubs, lodges, civic, political, social and cultural groups and community welfare enterprises. Besides which, the president is always compounding the agony by appointing committees to look into raising funds for mosquito spraying or the feasibility of a 9 o'clock curfew.

   Anyone who wants to rally to a cause or join a club can do so almost overnight. In fact, if he hasn't learned to say "no" he'll be engulfed in spite of himself and spend all his evenings at meetings.

   MY WIFE and I and some other folks have gathered once a month for years to eat and play cards. Just why we've never organized into the Supper and Shuffle club, drawn up a constitution and by-laws and branched out into some humanitarian endeavor already occupying 50 other groups is a mystery. But if anyone suggests such a step I'll throw in my hand.

   I recently presided over the obsequies of a church group which for years had writhed in the death throes. The fact that it foundered under my hand humbled me slightly. Yet all members, I think, experienced relief, as when death releases some long ill and helpless relative.

   It was simply one church organization too many. It folded because nobody was willing to be an officer for next year. Most members had so served in times past and realized the futility of it all.

   ONE INJUSTICE inherent in our craze for organization is that it embroils a lot of people whose only sin is that they make speeches or play the piccolo or show films of Alaska. They are constantly entreated by program chairmen to do their stuff at the club dinner next month.

   Such a pitch often is hard to refuse. Pick out 10 people at random on the street and the chances are that at least one is a program chairman. And he may be the fellow who loaned you a five spot in your time of need last week, or your wife's uncle's business partner who got you the job at the pickle works. All you can do is consent to make the speech, show the film or play a piccolo solo.

   And, sure enough, in the audience will be another program chairman who has simply loved your performance, and how about appearing before the South Side Spaghetti and Literary Society June 19?

   The only way to get rid off this hook is to be so bad that no program chairman of sound mind could bear to inflict such suffering on his fellows. I know. I made a speech once.

   I'M NOT much of a joiner, and think it little loss either to me or any organization. The sort of club I'd enjoy belonging to apparently doesn't exist. It would be one that had no programs, no serious discussions, no missions and no direction. It would meet once a month--during the noon hour so as not to befoul the evening--and whether you attended or not wouldn't matter. Eating would be the main purpose. Conversation, if any, would be spontaneous and on any subject, preferably trivial, and anyone wanting to make a speech would be thrown out.

   I could go on but must stop. I'm late for a committee meeting.

Copyright 2016 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

   

Pets Are No Great Moral Force

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial page staff

Published by the StarTribune

December 17, 1960

   MANY PARENTS will give their children pets this Christmas on the theory that they'll learn self discipline and responsibility by caring for them. The only thing wrong with this notion is that it's 80 percent cockeyed.

   I should know. I've given it a 26-year test, with the result that my wife and I have parceled out a ton or so of dog food, fed and administered last rites to innumerable goldfish, and helped keep a couple of parakeets in luxurious indolence.

   We've never had a cat, which is one fight I've won, and it's been a long time since we had a dog, but the pooch we had wouldn't have lived for 13 years unless we'd supplemented the irregular care provided by a son and daughter.

   THE PARAKEETS presently in residence are the property of our younger son. Ostensibly they are his responsibility. It is okay with him, however, if father mucks out the cage on Saturday morning when he is otherwise engaged. It's amazing how many important missions he has on Saturday. His conscience is eased, apparently, by his knowledge that I love the birds and am never happier than when playing chambermaid. If there are any parental rewards here I haven't detected them. The birds are eager eaters but too stupid to talk.

   There were three or four dogs in my childhood, several rabbits and a badger, none of which did anything startling toward steeling my moral fiber. The badger even failed to amuse me. It was every bit as sociable as you'd expect a badger to be and when it retreated under the woodshed, never to be seen again, I bore up quite well.

   OLD RED, the dog I best remember, was of humble origin but much admired by the gang because of his fighting ability. He lived to old age on chicken bones, table scraps and gophers, stuff that would kill today's pampered mutts within hours. Feeding the dog was my brother's job and mine, which meant that it was mother's.

   The rabbits were our responsibility exclusively. We got two of opposite sexes and expected their talent for multiplication would make us rich. This talent was arrested by starvation.

   WE ALWAYS had a cow around the place. One of these was a fractious beast that abhorred confinement and was named Pollyanna. She was glad the fence had only five strands of barbed wire.

   One particular bovine provided gave me more sense of responsibility and discipline than any dog ever did. I didn't have to milk the critter but father made it my job to take the cow to pasture a mile away every morning and fetch her back at night. When pop assigned a chore, he expected his progeny to deliver.

   I got quite attached to the cow, in a malevolent sort of way. She was nice to peg rocks at. But I don't suggest that anyone buy his child a Christmas cow. Something smaller is better, for urban living at least.

   THERE'S nothing wrong in buying a child a pet as long as you don't expect it to transform its little master. And I offer this prediction if you do buy him one. About mid-January mother will speak thus to her son: "All right, Jackie, forget to feed Rover once more--just once more--and out he goes. The dog is yours and you're to take care of him. Just remember that."

   So Jackie remembers for a day or two and then forgets again. It's odd, under the circumstances, that so few dogs are homeless--or it would be odd if parents weren't parents.

Copyright 2016 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

  

We're Shy of English Teachers

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial/opinion page staff

Published by the StarTribune

April 18, 1965

   I TAKE MY SHARE of liberties with the language and feel that the rules should permit a measure of flexibility, the better to capture the spirit of modernism infecting the land. But I'm a stickler for correct usage by others and believe hanging too good for supposedly educated folk who consistently misuse "lie" and "lay."

   I still believe, despite some contrary contentions, that by the time a lad finishes high school he should know an adverb from a preposition and have certain knowledge of composition and grammar.

   Several weeks ago I wrote a piece expressing amazement at the detail contained in a college English text devoted to teaching freshmen to write themes. Here was elementary information I was sure any college student would dismiss as something he'd suffered through in eighth grade.

   BUT PERHAPS I was wrong. I got a quick response from an English major, a man who a few years before had been pressed into service as a temporary freshman English teacher. 

   Had I read some of the themes he received, he said, I "would realize with a shock how urgently these freshmen needed just the kind of instruction you question."

   He had 56 students. "With only three exceptions they did not know how to spell. The symbols and uses of punctuation were as mysterious to them as some electronic code from outer space. They could not organize words into a simple sentence. They could not even put them together to make sense."

   This response was very disheartening and I looked up an English professor who has done research in the field and asked him if things really were this bad. He didn't think so, but confessed a vast need for improvement.

   "There simply aren't enough competent English teachers," he sighed. "About half such high school teachers don't have college majors in English." He cited a report of the National Council of Teachers of English which said that more than 94 percent of the colleges that prepare elementary teachers do not require systematized study of the history and structure of the English language and that over 61 percent do not require a course in grammar and usage.

   "But don't put all the blame on the teachers," he said. "Parents are even more to blame. Children don't hear enough English spoken at home. Dinner conversation is cursory at best, with no analogies ever drawn and few opinions articulately expressed."


 THERE IS A DEFINITE relation between grammar and reading, he continued, and parents seldom encourage children to read anything of substance. But youngsters with a broad background of reading "invariably do better in English than those who read little."

   Here the urban pupil has an advantage over his country cousin. Books are readily available to him, whereas the small-towner has no library at his elbow and not enough volumes other than anthologies are provided at school.

   The notion has been largely abandoned, the professor said with relief, that writing skills can be sharpened by parsing and diagramming sentences. Writing can be done better, he declared, if such procedures are forgotten.

   "We are searching for new approaches," he concluded. "Teaching a person to use the language, to be specific and articulate, to express thoughts accurately--teaching him to communicate and to write clearly--is one of the most important jobs that confronts us today."

   Who can say that he's wrong?

Copyright 2016 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.