Pioneer Scouting Days Recalled

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

March 5 1960

   OUR SON, new to Scouting, went on his first overnight last week and I gather it wasn't quite the ball he'd anticipated.  Fatigue was heavy upon him when he returned and he had little to say.  He had a blister from touching a hot pan.  He also had a cold.

   We were disappointed about his silence and his sniffles but, being aware of the boons of Scouting, knew the experience was good for him.  Our older son took to Scouting like a harvest hand to hot biscuits, went to camp several summers, made some of his warmest friendships there, and gained independence faster than otherwise would have been possible.

   SNIFFLES and occasional nights of chill on unyielding bunks are small prices to pay for resourcefulness and the dawning realization that mother can't always be on hand to tuck you in bed and tell you what shirt to wear.

   City boys, I'm sure, need Scouting more than do lads raised on farms or in small towns.  They're further removed from woods and streams and open country.  Hiking, camping and the smell of pine aren't so available.

   Scouting was slow to catch on in my town when I was a boy.  It was in its pioneer phase and the program was comparatively limited.  Also,  many of its chief attractions were old hat to most of us.

   THE ROCKIES were within range of horse and buggy and many families vacationed there, not in plush lodges but in tents.  Later, when the Model T came into glory, my brother and George Jackson and I would chug for the high country without benefit of adult supervision--sleeping in the open, hiking over vast and rugged country, and eating what we ourselves prepared, mostly trout.

   This was Scouting in the grand manner, and when a town preacher organized a troop he was hard put to teach the boys anything except the Scout law, oath and promise.  He made a brave show of woodlore and camping but didn't know as much as did many of his charges.  And his ignorance of an elementary health rule brought him ignominy and suffering.

   IT HAPPENED on his first--and last--"overnight."  These adventures weren't called overnights then, and this one was more than that.  We were to be gone a week, but weren't.  The campsite was on the river some 12 miles east of town.

   We got the tents pitched without incident, ate a supper featuring wieners, beans, fig bars and coffee, and went to sleep after hours of giggling, to the discomfort of Scoutmaster Haley, whose first name escapes me.

   Morning broke chill and misty and we breakfasted in glum and soggy silence, wondering by what harsh fate we had consented to this safari.

   ALL BUT Scoutmaster Haley.  He was as full of phony cheer as a circus barker, whistled a merry tune and exhorted us to rise above the weather like good Scouts.  To our amazement, after he had taken on a hefty store of bacon, eggs and flapjacks, he invited us to join him in a morning dip.  To the great credit of the Scouts, all emphatically declined.

   Undaunted, Scoutmaster Haley peeled off his clothes and, with his undigested breakfast, charged for the river.  One dunking was enough.  In seconds he was back in the cook tent, the epitome of teeth-chattering misery.

   Scoutmaster Haley spent the rest of the day in bed, sick as a dog and sick of Scouting.  Many of us feared for his survival.  He was on his feet next morning, but only because of his great urge to return to town, where providence seemed more divine.  We broke camp and headed homeward.

   That was my last experience as a Boy Scout.  To be a Scout you need a leader, and Scoutmaster Haley had had it.

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.

One Can Live Without Smoking

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

September 29, 1963

   IT ALL happened one evening when I ran out of cigarettes and decided I'd rather have 30 cents than a smoke.  Next morning I wondered if I could survive until noon without smoking.

   Hour after hour I put off smoking.  That evening, to steel myself against surrender, I told my wife I was through with tobacco.  Next morning I made the announcement at the office.  My associates grinned and a couple of them made bets as to how long before I resumed smoking.  

   It's now been 20 days, 12 hours and 10 minutes since I've smoked and I've gulped no "no smoke" pills, munched few mints, chewed little gum and sniffed no snuff.  I am coming to regard the cigarette habit as untidy, unsanitary, unhealthy, smelly and inexcusable.

   THE SAVING which accrues to those who quit cigarettes is considerable.  The habit has cost me about $125 a year, and for really heavy smokers it runs to $300 or more.  The saving in time is startling, too.  I've done some figuring merely on the incidentals for one year and have come up with this:

   Fueling $1 lighter and otherwise keeping it working 50 per cent of the time--65 minutes; lighting it--one hour; hunting for lighter, matches and ash trays--two hours; borrowing cigarettes-- 45 minutes; brushing ashes off pants--25 minutes; coughing--95 minutes; reassuring wife that you aren't coming down with lung cancer--45 minutes; listening to wife tell how well Bill MacKenzie looks since he's quit smoking--three hours.

   This totals quite a batch of time.  I can't say definitely what I'll now do with the additional hours but will think of some meaningful social contribution unless I get too fat to think.

   ALL THOSE who have quit smoking themselves tell me how much better I feel.  I'm glad to know that my health has improved but really can't say that I feel much better than when flooding the lungs with tar and nicotine.

   I don't sleep any better but my wife says this is because there was no room for improvement.  She declares that I appear more alert when awake, at least, and that I'm sleeping much quieter.  She thinks she might find it endurable to share the same bedroom with me again.

   I haven't quit smoking forever.  In my old age I'll resume it.  It'll be something to do while listening to the ball games.  But quitting isn't actually as difficult as the crusaders against tobacco would have you think.  The "quit smoking" campaigns, I suspect, do as much harm as good by building up the habit to the point of fascination.  Clinics and seminars are held to help addicts break away.  The anti-tobacco powwows catch some of the flavor of revival meetings.

   THEY MAKE renunciation of smoking appear about as easy as quitting dope, and the fellow who goes without cigarettes for a few weeks or months is hailed for Spartan resolve and religious faith.

   It really isn't that difficult to quit.  It's only as difficult as mental attitudes make it.  Keep telling yourself that quitting is easy and maybe it will be.  I know absolutely that I can go without smoking tomorrow.  All I need to do is hold this thought day after day.

   I admit that it makes the future seem a trifle bleak.

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.

Procrastination's Fatal in Planning Yule Cards

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

November 13, 1953

   THE HOLIDAYS have an insidious way of sneaking up on the unwary.  Before you know it, Christmas is next Friday and--if you are a man--you're no more ready for it than during the World Series.

   Some very precise timing is required, since your schedule must include the search for the ornament that goes on the top of the tree and having the neighbors in for fruit cake.  Unless you get the Christmas cards off your neck your ulcers will rebel to such a degree during the last-minute frenzy they'll give you distress until Easter.

   The greeting card routine is the biggest booby-trap of all.  Now is not a bit too early to plan your strategy.  If you want your card to be meaningful you cannot make a mad dash to town on Dec. 22 and come up with anything significant.

   A BRIEF replay of the procedure at my house may prove of value to those who have not yet established a plan of operation.  At least it will point up mistakes to be avoided.

   Circumstances normally dictate that we do the thing the hard way, with me doing most of the sweating.  We start with a snapshot of the family, taken in a last year's snowbank to provide appropriate Yule background.  This, superimposed on a greeting card, would be adequate for a sane family.  For us it is a bare beginning.

   "Why don't you write a poem, too?" my wife suggests, adding a helping of gush concerning my skill in such matters to soften me up.

   So I write a poem.  Composing it is the simplest part of the chore.  My introductory lines go something like this:

Now comes the end of '53

And we are happy as can be.

   With such a fruity beginning it is easy to carry on.  But reaching a stopping point comes hard.  I am inclined to grow so daft over my doggerel that, instead of winding up with a sonnet, I come up with something which compares favorably, in length at least, with Evangeline.

   THE NEXT maneuver is to make out a list, using the cards you received last year as a guide.  This is easy provided you can find last year's cards.  Our custom is to stash them away so carefully that they vanish without a trace.  We are forced to fall back on a document, now yellow with age, listing names we typed shortly after Pearl Harbor.

   For a week memories are dredged for additions to the list, and drawers rifled for the present addresses of the Fluegels and Merritts, who moved some time ago to Dodge City and Cedar Rapids respectively.

   We assume that 75 cards will be adequate, which means that in the final shakedown we pare the list down to 125 names and never are sure until Christmas Eve if 125 cards will be adequate.

   RETURN NOW to the poem.  Making more than 100 copies of this gem on a typewriter is no breeze even for an advanced hunt-and-peck operator.  I never make less than six carbons.  The last two are badly out of focus but we send them along anyway, since we don't have to decipher the things.  Typographical errors must, perforce, be ignored.  Only once did I turn an eraser loose among this jungle of carbons.  The results profaned my sense of tidiness.  

   After the 16-hour typing stint, my mate is ready to address and stuff the envelopes.  There is, however, one additional bit of business.  To her very personal friends she must send more than a picture and a poem.  She must write each a note on the back of the picture.  Her very personal friends number approximately 125.

   She chooses the witching hours of the night to make her contribution to the Yule correspondence, preferring to work in our bedroom so as not to be alone.  I won't mind, of course, since I can sleep in a boiler factory.

   Armed with fountain pen and three or four apples, she takes up the yoke, pausing in her pen scratching and munching now and again to wonder why I don't quit muttering and go to sleep, for Pete sake.

   WHEN everything goes smoothly like this we have our cards in the mail by Dec. 20.  It is best that the deadline be no later than this.  Otherwise you run out of time.  You need at least three days to find out what gift your wife expects and another day to buy it.

   There are then left those precious minutes in which to get the tree decorated and the stockings filled and to get the bicycle for Junior and the doll house for Mary in from the garage and to wrap the family gifts and repair the two strings of lights that just blinked out and fall into bed before the little ones rout you out to start the merry day.

 Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Bookshelves Inspire a Builder

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

January 19, 1964

   LAST FEBRUARY this correspondent's adult education course in woodworking was ground into the sawdust because of a fall on the ice.  I had paid more than $10 for lumber and fittings and was nicely launched on some bookshelves when I broke an arm and had to give up.  I cannot use power tools with one hand.  Without help, I barely can use them with two.

   But incapacity did not remove the need for more book space.  Books we hadn't seen for years--some of them borrowed, I was to discover--were moldering away in dark corners for lack of display room.  We didn't actually know what books we had.  Some were here, some there.  Inventory was all but impossible.

   FOR 11 MONTHS my 10 bucks worth of pine, the lumber I had planned to convert into a facility for my basement study, lay in the attic.  Then, after the holiday madness was over and the numbness had subsided, I thought of that costly jag of timber and closed in on the stuff.

   Had the work been done under the eye of the woodworking instructor I might not have been given an "A."  Progress was amazingly swift, however, probably because of a certain casualness about measurements and to some extent because my wife kept her distance.

   NORMALLY at the first swing of the hammer she smells trouble and wonders what I'm doing.  This time she wasn't alert to what was going on until near the finish.  I fooled her by using screws rather than nails.  But even the best of us can't avoid occasional pounding.  If hammers weren't needed they wouldn't be made.

   When the time finally came to pound, my wife warned me that the blows were cracking the upstairs plaster.  But subsequent search, just as I suspected, revealed no cracks.  Women automatically subscribe to what the Pentagon terms the strategy of overkill.

   SUBJECT to a few minor refinements, the bookshelves are now finished and hanging from the rafters.  To those who might find esthetic or artistic fault, I can say only this: the installation fulfills its main function.  It holds a heap of books.

   The volumes formerly piled on the desk are in it.  So are the books which had graced a couple of shelves above the desk--shelves originally used for paint, varnish, putty, nails and other do-it-yourself torments.  I'm now assiduously bird-dogging books from attic corners and putting them on the new shelves.

   I'M ALSO thrilled.  Such triumphs are small, of course, to men of broad gauge and accomplishment, but they can give an ordinary life a new destiny and purpose.  I told my son and wife this and they seemed amused.  They smiled.

   I said I was exhilarated to the point where I might buy a full line of power tools and become a sure-enough builder of whatever needed building.

   Dormant skills might flower.  A new craftsman might be born, a sleeping artisan awakened.

   Wife and son kept on smiling.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Thanksgiving With Grandparents

By DAVID W. GUTHRIE

Guest columnist of Charles M. Guthrie

published by the StarTribunewww.startribune.com

David  Guthrie  (front-center)

November 22, 1964

   GRANDPA GUTHRIE sent me one dollar and said why didn't I try writing a colum for him and if what I wrote was worth puting in the paper I could keep the one dollar.

   I asked what I should write about and he said he did not care as long as it was something I knew about and it would be rediculus for a 10-year-old kid to write about Vet Nam or Goldwater.

   He said Thanksgiving is coming up and you might try something about that.  My cosin Mark Shoberg did that last year and Gramps thought it might be good for all his grandsons to have a go at Thanksgiving and make it a tradishon.  But there are eight of us and that would be six more years to go and the old gent might not be writing a colum that long on account of being dead and besides there is no law against the stork bringing more kids.

   I THOUGHT A BETTER idea would be to write about our two Scotties but Gramps said he had wrote a piece about dogs earlyer in the month and the readers could not stand another one so hear goes about Thanksgiving.

   Sometimes we go to Butch and Edna's which are my other grandparents in Jeffers but usually we spend Thanksgiving on Grandma and Grandpa Guthrie and probly will do it again this year if Dad can get off work.  He is a dog and cat doctor and dum animals are just as lible to get sick or hit by a car on a holiday as any other time, Dad says.  But it is to late to cry about that now.  He should of thought about that before he went into vetnery.

   A while back I heard Gramps say that maybe we would eat out this Thanksgiving to give Grandma a breather and not be working her head off in the kitchen.  I would not care much about eating out as Grandma is a neat cook.

   There are six in our family counting Mom and Dad.  And Dad's sister and her husband have four boys to and they are driving to the old folks for Thanksgiving to.  That makes 12 of us and Uncle Tom and Grandma and Gramps make it 15 so I am not worried about eating out.  This would cost the old fellow 40 bucks or more and there is nothing he likes better than money.

   MAYBE HE THINKS he could feed the grown ups for about 21 dollars and us eight little kids could get one half portions and maybe eat for a buck and a quarter each.  Well, if he thinks we will hold still for that he has another think coming because I and Todd and Mike can put it away about as good as Dad.  And my cosins Mark, Cary and Paul eat good to.  The only ones who would not cry about one half portions are my brother Scott and cosin Bobby who are to little to know it when they get gipped.

   We go kind of pot luck on Thanksgiving.  Grandma gets the worst of it with the turkey and dressing and potatoes and stuff but my Mom brings salad and pickles and stuff and my aunt brings minse and punkin pies.  She could leave out the minse for all I care but it is Gramps favorite and he is her father and she likes to humer him.

   It is fun to go there because Grandma never throws nothing away.  There are old cars and trucks in the garage and toys in the basement and atic and if Gramps had his way they would all be throwed out as he says it is just something to stumble over but Grandma says as long as us kids like to play with it she will hang on to it because that is what grandmas are for.

   My Dad says to pay no attention to Gramps as he does a lot of blowing which does not add up to nothing but wind and Dad ought to know what he is talking about as he was Gramps little kid once.

Mad magazine  #39  May 1958  

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'Storms'--a Pain in the Neck! (It's Time to Change 'Em, Gents)

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Minneapolis Tribune Staff Writer

published by the StarTribune

October 3, 1948

   Let's face it, gents.  The melancholy days are here.  It's time to put on the storm windows.

   The thought of it may fill you with deep and abiding repugnance, as it does me.  I have long listed the storm window as the home's top torment and its inventor as a Machiavellian fiend.  In my moments of calm I realize that he may have been a benign gentleman who sought only to stop winter's march past the threshold.  But when in the throes of jimmying storm windows into place I know no calm.  The ghost of this inventor haunts me.  I feel his scoffing presence as I strain to affix protesting sash to window frame.  He chuckles as I bark knuckles, and howls as I inadvertently stick my foot through glass.

   Were it not that my family's wish is my command and that I am a slave to convention, I would let my storm windows rot in the garage.  I would wear red flannels, earmuffs and overcoat in all my waking hours, thumb my leaky nose at the drafts and be rid forever of a chore that converts me from an affable husband and father into a screaming despot.

   I have endured this torture for some two decades, however, and deem it a solemn duty to pass along to the neophyte the pointers I have stumbled upon along the way.

LOOK 'EM OVER

   Although taking off the screens and putting in the windows is enough to try a man's soul, there is more to the job than this.  The screens must be inspected for holes, mended and painted.  My tendency is to postpone this until spring.  Come spring, I postpone it until fall.

   Then look over your storm windows.  The four or five that Junior has thrown his baseball through will have to be hustled off to the glazier.

    You will find gaping voids in others crying for putty.  Fail to install same and your window is but half efficient.  I always figure to put on the putty after the window has been hung.  Then I forget the whole thing.

   Your screens pointed up for spring and put away, your storm windows chinked, you are set for what can be the most irksome job of all--washing the glass.  But you can make of it a casual, breezy job.  I line the windows up against the garage, blast them fore and aft with the garden hose, then let the law of evaporation take over.

YOU CAN'T WIN

   Your windows will emerge with a few streaks, but research convinces me that there'll be streaks regardless.  I've rubbed the glass with cheesecloth, muslin, winter underwear, old flannel shirts, newspapers.  Look at the pane from one angle and it sparkles like a trout stream.  From another it resembles a map of Minnesota rivers.

    On most window ledges you will encounter a discouraging assortment of debris--cobwebs, bobby pins, dirt and cigarette butts.

   I find it expedient to bat this refuse away with my hat.  Be certain to do this while the little woman isn't looking.  She'll insist that you clean ledge and window frame with soap and water.  Women cling to the outmoded belief that one must toil mightily to do a job well.

   But the hat-fanning method accomplishes the major results and speeds progress amazingly.  In all jobs around the house I give studied inattention to the little niceties.  After all, time marches inexorably on.  Our little stay is brief enough at best and if we louse it up with petty and tedious detail we have no time for loafing, bridge, ball games and quiz shows, the things that give life character and meaning.

   Now to hang the storm windows.  First, you must know what window goes where.  This data is mandatory.  If you've done the job on your present abode before, you have already sweat out this  information and have marked the windows.  We experts favor the number system and I recommend it to any layman not confused by numbers running into two digits.

OH, YEAH?

   But if you're putting up the windows for the first time you might as well know you're going to suffer.  The fellow who lived there last year will tell you you'll have no trouble.

    "They're all marked," he'll say.  "Can't go wrong."

   They're marked, yes, in Sanskrit.  And rather than knock yourself out trying to crack the code you'll be ahead in time and sanity if you start from scratch.

   Although many use a measuring stick to advantage, I favor the trial and error method.  Feet, inches and fractions thereof irk me.  If you're lucky you'll find that one in five windows fits without much coaxing.  But most have a nasty tendency to change shapes and sizes during the off season.  You'll have to go at these with a plane.  Do so, though, with caution.  Anger gets you nowhere.  In my hot-headed twenties I was given to paring living room windows down to bathroom size during bursts of passion.  A rule of thumb method I now use with occasional success is to assume that if the storm window is more than a quarter of an inch too large or too small it's in the wrong spot.

   If yours is a two-story house, you may meet your Waterloo on the second floor.  If cursed with hypsophobia to the degree that I am you'll be terror-stricken.  The manly method is to lug your window up a ladder and slap it into place.

    I wouldn't do that for all Fort Knox's gold.  I cart it up the stairway, scuffing woodwork and dressers and swiping mirrors and cosmetics off dressers en route to my goal.

   I ease the storm sash out the window.  Then, with chest and stomach balancing on the ledge, I grope blindly above with my burden, seeking the moorings.  Thus far success has always come before apoplexy.  It would be well, if you have a small boy in the house, to have him hold your feet down, thus preventing a headlong death plunge.  And, if you can reach the seventh rung of the ladder without contracting rigor mortis, by all means hang the window from the outside.  It will enhance your standing in the community.

    A word of caution.  Don't listen to the World Series while putting up the windows.

   In the ninth inning of the seventh game two years ago, tragedy struck the Boston Red Sox and me simultaneously.  While St. Louis was scoring the winning run I rushed from my post of duty to the radio, and smashed the finest storm window the family ever owned.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the 

express approval of the StarTribune.

These Are Emotional Times for Baseball-Crazy Fellows

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

September 28, 1954

   THERE'S a tense week ahead for the baseball fan, starting tomorrow with the World Series.  I don"t mean the lucky cuss who can watch a game with the cold, analytical eye of a loan shark, alert for fine strategy and play.  I mean the bleeder, the wretch who follows one particular club and who is lifted to ecstasy or booted into despond by that club's varying fortunes.

   These are the boys who will suffer--the ones who love the Cleveland Indians or the New York Giants. They will hover around the radio or TV sets like June bugs around an arc light, gnaw their fingernails up to the elbow, chain smoke, go into apoplexy with every opposition rally and wish that the torment would end so they could relax and get some sleep.

   THIS ADDICTION to baseball in general and one club in particular makes no sense whatever.  Life goes on regardless of how one game or one series comes out.  Your baseball bug tells himself that every time his team loses --and he keeps right on bleeding.  The disease is incurable.

   It has its roots back in childhood, I think.  Nobody who fails to develop an interest in the game when he is a kid can acquire the suicidal devotion to it in later life that the baseball nut has.  The genuine addict probably played some as a boy and had visions of one day being a big leaguer.  Or he developed a fancy for one player and took that player's club to his bosom, there to hold it unto death.

   I caught the disease from a book, written long ago by Christy Mathewson, immortal New York pitcher.  It was called "Pitching in a Pinch" and it laid hold of me good.  I since have known few care-free summers.  My heart has belonged to the New York Giants.  If I am the soul of amicability of an evening it's because the Giants have won.  If I beat the kids and drive my wife to tears with snide remarks about the stew it's because they've lost.

   MAYBE you think I'm riding high now, since the Giants have won the pennant.  I am, but it's an uneasy ride.  I'm afraid of that low-down Cleveland club, which never has lost a World Series.  If they win this one I shall survive, I suppose.  The Giants have failed me before, and often, and I have muddled through.  But each tragedy has left its scar.

   When the Giants took on Leo Durocher  as manager I felt that I was cured.  He had been manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and I hated both him and the Bums exceedingly.  But it made no difference.  Even though my estimate of Durocher is little changed, the Giants are still my boys.  I would string along with them if Georgi Malenkov were manager.

   Nice guys, somehow don't manage the Giants.  They've had but one who could qualify as such.  He was Mel Ott, a great player but no barn burner as a pilot.  The others, John McGraw, Bill Terry and Durocher, hardly could qualify as charmers.

   Just as managers make no difference in my allegiance, neither does team personnel.  If my current raves, Willie Mays and Johnny Antonelli, were traded to the Pirates my affections would not shift to Pittsburgh.  Willie and Johnny would become enemies.  If the Giants and Cardinals swapped complete teams, Stan Musial would become my ideal.

   I HOPE this week to shift some of the work to a couple of associates who are not baseball crazy.  Then I can watch the games.  In doing so, though, I shall be playing into Cleveland's hands.  Seldom do I see or hear a game that the Giants win.  I jinx them.

   It wasn't Bobby Thomson's homer that decided that playoff game between Brooklyn and New York back in '51.  I was the unsung hero.  I watched this one until the Giants went into the last half of the ninth, trailing by three runs.  By then my suffering had been too much.  I walked away, to mourn alone. A few minutes later the fellows were yelling that New York had won.  I raced back to the television set just in time to catch the final commercial.  But had I remained, Thompson would have been just another out.

   I'm going to watch this series, though.  I have laid up a store of cigarettes and aspirin and my fingernails are a nice length for gnawing.  And I've done what I could to counteract the jinx.  I have a dollar down on Cleveland--and I seldom win bets.  I hope I lose this one.  But if I don't there will be a slight monetary solace for an aching heart.

Addendum--   The Giants swept the Series in four games to win their first championship since 1933, defeating the heavily favored Indians.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express consent of the StarTribune.