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CHAPTER 1
A Visit with the Folks
Periodically I go back to a churchyard cemetery on the side of an Appalachian hill in northern Virginia to call on family elders. It slows the juices down something marvelous.
They are all situated right behind an imposing brick church with a tall square brick bell-tower best described as honest but not flossy. Some of the family elders did construction repair work on that church and some of them, the real old timers, may even have helped build it, but I couldn't swear to that because it's been there a long, long time.
The view, especially in early summer, is so pleasing that it's a pity they can't enjoy it. Wild roses blooming on fieldstone fences, fields white with daisies, that soft languorous air turning the mountains pastel blue out toward the West.
The tombstones are not much to look at. Tombstones never are in my book, but they do help in keeping track of the family and, unlike a family, they have the virtue of never chafing at you.
This is not to say they don't talk after a fashion. Every time I pass Uncle Lewis's I can hear it say, "Come around to the barber shop, boy, and I'll cut that hair." Uncle Lewis was a barber. He left up here for a while and went to the city. Baltimore. But he came back after the end. Almost all of them came back finally, those that left, but most stayed right here all along.
Well, not right here in the churchyard, but out there over the fields, two, three, four miles away. Grandmother was born just over that rolling field out there near the woods the year the Civil War ended, lived most of her life about three miles out the other way there near the mountain, and has been right here near this old shade tree for the past 50 years.
We weren't people who went very far. Uncle Harry, her second child, is right beside her. A carpenter. He lived 87 years in these parts without ever complaining about not seeing Paris. To get Uncle Harry to say anything, you have to ask for directions.
"Which way is the schoolhouse?" I ask, though not aloud of course.
"Up the road that way a right good piece," he replies, still the master of indefinite navigation whom I remember from my boyhood.
It's good to call on Uncle Lewis, grandmother and Uncle Harry like this. It improves your perspective to commune with people who are not alarmed about the condition of NATO or whining about the flabbiness of the dollar.
The elders take the long view. Of course, you don't want to indulge too extensively in that long a view, but it's useful to absorb it in short doses. It corrects the blood pressure and puts things in a more sensible light.
After a healthy dose of it, you realize that having your shins kicked in the subway is not the gravest insult to dignity ever suffered by common humanity.
Somewhere in the vicinity is my great-grandfather who used to live back there against the mountain and make guns, but I could never find him. He was born out that way in 1817 — James Monroe was President then — and I'd like to find him to commune a bit with somebody of blood kin who was around when Andrew Jackson was in his heyday.
After Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, he would probably not be very impressed about much that goes on nowadays, and I would like to get a few resonances off his tombstone, a cool frisson of contempt maybe for a great-grandchild who had missed all the really perilous times.
Unfortunately, I am never able to find him, but there is Uncle Irvey, grandmother's oldest boy. An unabashed Hoover Republican. "Eat all those string beans, boy," I hear as I nod at his tombstone.
And here is a surprise: Uncle Edgar. He has been here for years, but I have never bumped into him before. I don't dare disturb him, for he is an important man, the manager of the baseball team, and his two pitchers, my Uncle Harold and my Cousin-in-law Howard, have both been shelled on the mound and Uncle Edgar has to decide whether to ask the shortstop if he knows anything about pitching.
My great-grandfather who made guns is again not to be found, but on the way out I pass the tombstone of another great-grandfather whose distinction was that he left an estate of $3.87. It is the first time I have passed this way since I learned of this, and I smile his way, but something says, "In the long run, boy, we all end up as rich as Rockefeller," and I get into the car and drive out onto the main road, gliding through fields white with daisies, past fences perfumed with roses, and am rather more content with the world.
CHAPTER 2
The Boy Who Came to Supper
For a long time I used to eat supper. "Supper's at 5 o'clock and you'd better be here," my mother would say. We lived in the rural South then, but later we moved to New Jersey and kept right on eating supper, though sometimes it was as late as 6 o'clock.
In fact, I was still eating supper at the age of 22 when I started working for an Eastern newspaper. Since it was a morning paper, the work hours extended from 3 P.M. to midnight with an hour off to eat, and at 7 P.M. an editor habitually notified me that it was all right to go to dinner.
Since all the other reporters racing for the first martini were also going to dinner, I went to dinner, too. In this way I gradually became a dinner eater, though the transition was confusing. On days off, since I was still living at home, my mother insisted that I eat supper, though it was often served as late as 7 P.M. now.
For a year or two, I remained in this transitional stage — a dinner eater at the office, a supper eater at home. Since I was eating dinner five nights a week and supper only twice, however, the dinner habit began to enslave me and tensions developed at home.
"When are we going to have dinner?" I would ask my mother. "Supper will be ready as soon as I finish frying the potato cakes," she would say. We were drifting apart. Something basic we had once shared had now eroded. I was moving into another world, the world of the dinner eaters, while she was firmly anchored in the world of supper eaters. I left home and have been an incorrigible dinner eater ever since.
This distinction between Americans who eat supper and those who eat dinner is one of the most striking divisions in the national life, yet nobody has ever persuasively explained the difference between the parties, though many sociologists have tried.
Andy Rooney, for example, holds that it defines the difference between political parties. Democrats eat supper before sundown, he states, while Republicans eat it at 8 P.M. and call it dinner.
If this is so, how does he explain why headwaiters in New York keep me waiting at the bar past 10 P.M. while influential Democrats arriving in limousines are promptly ushered to the dinner table I thought I had reserved for 8:30?
Calvin Trillin has a theory that the distinction has something to do with American regionalism. His three tests for identifying an Eastern city are: "a place where nobody on the City Council ever wears white patent-leather shoes, where there are at least two places to buy pastrami" and "where just about everybody eats supper after dark and calls it dinner."
Trillin's theory is not supported by my experience in Newark, N.J., and Baltimore — indisputably Eastern cities, in which I lived for 15 years among people who almost universally ate supper. In fact, the notion that anybody could eat dinner at the end of the day, except in the movies, never occurred to me until the age of 22.
Until then, in my experience, dinner was eaten only once a week, always at 3 o'clock on Sunday afternoon. When somebody invited you to dinner you assumed it would be eaten at midafternoon on Sunday and the menu would be chicken. Having seen Jean Harlow and Wallace Beery in "Dinner at Eight," I realized there were unique people who put on tuxedos and gowns to eat dinner at the hour when normal people were taking their prebedtime cocoa, but the idea that I might ever doll up in order to tuck into the potato cakes seemed as far-fetched as the possibility of picking up Claudette Colbert on a Greyhound bus.
When I was in the transitional stage, learning to eat dinner with veteran journalistic dinner eaters, I first assumed that dinner was distinguished from supper by the beverage that came with it. Supper had always been accompanied by iced tea, a glass of milk or, in cold weather, a cup of coffee, all of which were designed to wash down the potato cakes. At dinner, the prevailing drink seemed to be gin, which was designed to help you forget you were eating potato cakes.
This may explain why I was converted so easily, but it does not explain anything more profound, since deeper investigation showed that many supper eaters partake regularly of beer, and even bourbon with ginger ale, while many dinner eaters are content with soda water, a few ice cubes and a slice of lime.
Long investigation of this division among Americans forces me to dismiss as myths such popular theories as: (1) that blue-collar people eat supper while establishment people eat dinner; (2) that people with good digestion eat supper while people prone to gastric distress eat dinner; and (3) that people with hearty appetites are supper eaters while people with jaded palates are dinner eaters who are really just going through the motions so they will have an excuse to lap up the wine.
My studies have produced only two illuminating facts: first, that a real supper eater wouldn't be caught dead with a Cuisinart in the kitchen; second, that dinner eaters are five times less likely than supper eaters to faint dead away if you serve them an artichoke.
CHAPTER 3
Heck on Wheels
Norman Rockwell and I never saw things eye to eye when we worked together on The Saturday Evening Post. Norman was illustrating covers and I was trying to sell the finished product. The selling was hard labor.
I would strap on my roller skates, sling a canvas bag containing two dozen Saturday Evening Posts over my shoulder and begin by ringing doorbells. The sales pitch was simple: "Want to buy a Saturday Evening Post?" As the week progressed, it became tinged with subtle pathos: "You don't want to buy a Saturday Evening Post, I suppose?"
During the final day or two of each week's sales campaign, when the imminent arrival of next week's batch of Posts loomed like the Wehrmacht massing on the borders of the soul, I would post myself at a strategic traffic light and dart among idling cars shouting, "Saturday Evening Post!"
In good weeks, the sales profit ran as high as 25 cents, which, even though a nickel could buy three apples in those days, did not strike me as the kind of revenue that was going to induce J.P. Morgan to put out the red carpet when I arrived to establish a line of credit.
It was clear to me that the fault was largely Norman's. Although I was only eight, or nine, or ten at the time, I had seen enough of the mass market to realize that Norman's vision of reality was hopelessly askew. The world whose doorbell I rang hungered for tales of illicit passion, gore and depravity, and was shameless about saying so.
Mounting three flights of stairs on wheeled feet, banging at an apartment door, flashing Norman's vision of America, I would be met by a slattern in beer fumes declaring the only magazine she wanted was True Confessions.
Men sat around the house in their undershirts growing whiskers in that America. Permanent unemployment tends to make a man indifferent to the dictates of Gentlemen's Quarterly and sour of temper toward midgets on roller skates peddling Norman's wholesome folks.
"Why don't you sell something good like True Detective?"
"... Spicy Adventure?"
"... Doc Savage?"
I never told Norman what the world was really like out there. The Saturday Evening Post did not tolerate its business officers trying to interfere with its editorial content. Consequently, Norman never drew a boozy woman in bare feet at the front door announcing her preference for tales of adultery, nor the look in the eye of an unshaven man in his undershirt when he tells you that he'd really rather look at pictures of mutilated bodies (preferably female).
The disagreement between Norman and me was never expressed. As a result, Norman went on painting dogs as winsomely lovable pooches instead of nasty, snarling carnivores ready to pounce at the first sound of a roller skate wheel on the front porch.
Long afterwards it occurred to me that if I had gone to him and said, "Look, Norman, I'm dying out here trying to sell these wholesome characters and phony mutts you're painting," he would have smiled and painted me as an apple-cheeked nine-year-old with a patch on my corduroy knickers and innocence sticking out all over my cowlick. He was that insistent about refusing to see the world as it is instead of as it should be.
At the time of his death, people who have to comment on such things stated that despite his mass audience — perhaps the largest any painter has ever had — he was not an artist but an illustrator. I don't know. There are many definitions of art. Somebody has said that art is a lie that helps us to perceive the truth, and it seems to me that this pretty well expresses what his work was about.
His paintings are graphic fairy tales about Americans. They speak of a people unbelievably decent and innocent. That we were not during the age he painted is beside the point; the fact is that Americans in that time thought of themselves as such. And, indeed, acted on that assumption when the age culminated in World War II.
In "Not So Wild a Dream," one of the definitive books for students of World War II, Eric Sevareid writes that he was frequently astonished and appalled by the innocence in which American soldiers went to death for a purpose of which they understood nothing except that it was fundamentally decent.
This old sense of innocence, which we have now lost, had bleak political consequences, beginning with our refusal to set realistic war aims in the 1940s and ending with the triumph of the notion that the alternative to innocence must be cynicism.
I didn't understand Norman's significance in the old days. All I could see was that he didn't know what it was like trying to sell The Saturday Evening Post on roller skates. He saw things truer than I did. It was an honor to work with him.
CHAPTER 4
Gross Roots
Watching the reporters take off in battalion strength for Plains, Ga., to search for the roots of Jimmy Carter in the summer of '76, I finally realized why I have always shrunk from running for President. Splendid though the honor would be, I wouldn't dream of subjecting my home crossroads to the indignities which necessarily occur when the press descends in force to do its sociological study of the candidate's roots.
It would surely take these ferrets no more than a day or two to unearth the fact that, as a toddler, one of my most memorable achievements was the discovery that my Uncle Bruce hid his whisky in a Mason jar behind the barrel of whitewash in the rear of my grandmother's house. Or that my grandmother, on being shown the evidence by me, threw the whisky on the woodpile and gave Uncle Bruce such a lecture that he never touched the stuff again for several days.
Uncle Bruce is dead now and beyond public humiliation, but I cherish his memory too closely to want to see the story laid out in Newsweek under an old snapshot of him, merely to authenticate my early rustic credentials for the Presidency.
Moreover, since the episode occurred during Prohibition, making his possession of the stuff a criminal enterprise, and since the only surviving snapshots of Uncle Bruce show him with several days' growth of whiskers, he would be bound to emerge from the presentation as a distinctly sinister character.
He was not, of course. Almost everybody at the crossroads who was male shared his taste for moonshine, while almost everybody who was female spent a good bit of time emptying Mason jars on woodpiles. I shudder to imagine what character assassinations this would produce in the press encampment, and now that I think of it, I am not altogether certain it would help my campaign to have The Chicago Tribune discover that the first skill I mastered was capping the bottles of my father's home-brew.
The exception to the prevailing contempt for the 18th Amendment was Uncle Irvey. He was a church deacon and a Republican, which was permissible, at least for deacons, in this particular region of the shallow South. In 1928 he had persuaded my Uncle Harry to vote for Herbert Hoover, and when the Depression arrived shortly afterward, Uncle Harry held Uncle Irvey personally responsible for it.
I don't know what the network sleuths would make of the fact that for years thereafter Uncle Harry never spoke to Uncle Irvey except in anger, but I suspect there would be nasty suggestions that ours was an eccentric family. This would be totally misleading.
Although not a member of the Peace Corps like Mrs. Lillian Carter, my mother was equally adventurous and taught school in an area that was always called "up there along the mountain." Through her school connections, one of my earliest heroes became a boy named "Eleven." The story had it that Eleven was his parents' 11th-born child, that when he came along they were at a loss for a name they hadn't already used, and so decided to improvise.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams"
by .
Copyright © 1983 Russell Baker.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
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