Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

VICKIE STURGEON: This edition of the poet's perspective is about those peculiar, hairless, two-legged animals who with an assured sense of propriety and tremendous drive to extend their influence over all of nature's dominions, transform the prairies into complex networks of agriculture and commerce.

They are, of course, the rural men, a hardworking, hardplaying, sometimes rowdy bunch who often equated self-interest with the interests of their communities or of the rest of society as a whole. In this program, Joe and Nancy Paddock will look at these men and some of their activities from The Poet's Perspective.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOE PADDOCK: One of the people that I've talked with and interviewed-- well, probably talking mostly our examples will be mostly through oral history. In this particular discussion of rural men was with a man by the name of Dick [? Dudeck, ?] who comes from a long line of blacksmiths. Started over in Czechoslovakia and have continued here in Minnesota. And Dick talks about his dad as a blacksmith. And you get a sense, I think, of the same sort of suffering that perhaps rural women lived with.

It says, "And he left his dinner and go and fix somebody up rather than finish his dinner like I would do now. And sometimes he never did finish the meal. He was very good hearted. He'd start out 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. oh, yes, it's cooler you see.

Years ago, you used to work in the forge almost constantly. And your early morning was always cooler, and we appreciated it. You can imagine when the temperature got 80, 90, 100 degrees, it gets pretty darn hot over that forge. And then, we usually went back in the evening for a while.

No, I'm glad that stage of it is over with. That was hard work. Right in the front of the shop, there was a rail that tied horses to when he shooed them. When dad got to the hind legs of a horse-- they're harder to shoo than the front-- used to have somebody, maybe one of the hired men, lift the front foot and hold that up.

See, if you have one foot up, the horse can't kick. Well, then he'd go around to the back leg. He had a leather strap with a buckle, and he'd put that around the horse's foot, way down then he'd buckle it. Then in that strap was a large ring. He'd take this 3/4 inch rope. It was a very good rope. And a horse's tail has a stump a few inches from the butt of the horse. The rest is all hair.

Well, he'd feel for that stump, and then he'd tie the rope in there. Then double that tail up and tie it around that stump again. Then he'd run the other end of the rope down through the ring. We were just growing up. And I remember to this day, four or five of us hanging to the other end of a 50-foot rope holding like everything. That horse is kicking and kicking like everything on that one leg. And the harder he kicked, the harder he pulled on his tail. So he finally gave up with that.

But these horses would just work up a white froth. I mean, they was that mean. Dad would usually work an hour or two hours with a horse, and when he got all through he'd maybe get $2. You've got to have a strong back and a weak mind." That was one of the old craftsman's cliches, I think, as I recall.

NANCY PADDOCK: I suppose that's true. I remember something that Harold Dickinson from Olivia told about some craftsman. The Warner Brothers they were. And, of course, these are not the movie Warner Brothers. These were builders. And this is Harold talking about their building.

"The Warner Brothers were good builders. I used to get a kick out of them. There was three of them, Lloyd and Royal, and Don. You could tell when the Warner Brothers were on the job. They played a tune with their hammers. You could just tell on their job. They usually hit a nail with those hammers. But if there wasn't a nail there, in order to keep the thing going, they'd hit it anyway. I'm sure it made a tempo to their job. They were good carpenters, yeah. Don, as I recall, studied to be an architect."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOE PADDOCK: The joy in doing their work, controlling their environment, which was what their work was in those days, was very common to hear about. And one of the old timers I talked with was a man by the name of Pat Riddle. And he talked about old time thrashing.

And he was the engineer on one of the old steam rigs. And enthusiasm for machines at that time was very high because it did give great power. And I'll read you a little bit about Pat talking about being an engineer on an old steam rig.

"Well, I tell you, I never thought the last year I pulled the old throttle in that would be the end. I loved thrashing. Yep, them were the days I wish to God I could turn back to them. I told my dad-- we was farming back then-- I said, in the fall of the year, I'm going thrashing. Yeah, he said, if you want to be engineer of one of them engines, why, it's better than farming. Why, go ahead.

That was old man [? Koubek's ?] rig. I got married to his daughter, and then I run the rig. Well, I handled his machine right too. Wouldn't walk away from it. Thrashed for 60, 70 days just our own neighborhood out there. For that I wouldn't charge nothing for it. Took it out of my engineer's costs. Yeah, that was a life and a half, I tell you. I always liked it.

Well, first I was a fireman before I was an engineer. I always wanted to be around an engine, and this fellow here, he needed a fireman. I was a good fireman. Oh, you got to know how to do it if you want to be a good one. We was firing straw. We used the same straw that they were thrashing. Well, we had to. That was at first.

Later, we used coal. When you put in straw, you had to shoot. You used a four-tine fork. You'd rake up that straw and just keep shoving it up there. And when it's filled up, you've got to know how to take your poker and poke that straw down. There's all kinds of tricks to it.

Well, Pat went on after that and went through the whole process of running that rig. And I could see a joy in his face as he went back and worked through detail by detail very carefully how it was done top to bottom. And it was still running a machine in those days. It wasn't quite as automatic as it is now either. Little things had to be done all along the line.

You had to get up before daylight in the morning just to get the steam pressure built up before anybody else did, so it would be ready when the thrashers were ready. And he was proud because, I suppose, he was the center of power in a way running that machine. That was the center. That was the thing that got things done."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NANCY PADDOCK: We were talking about the different things that rural men did for their community. And part of this information that Dick Honsey gave us was concerned with the local volunteer fire department, which was quite an institution in the town, and there's really a lot of enthusiasm for it.

"There's a lot of training. Everybody is trained to take any job in the department. He ain't just a ladder man or he ain't just a hose man. We try to get them so they can understand anything. You got to keep brushing up on something all the time. And about the time you get a man that's good, then it's time for him to retire. And you have to start all over again with a new one.

That turnover is pretty regular. But one thing, the matter with the Fellows that have been coming in is that they're too gung-ho. You got to hold them back a bit. The damn floor might cave in or something. Some of these fellows they just throw everything away, their life and everything else.

But we've been lucky, a few cuts and that's all. Like I say, if you want to do a job, you want to do it well. And that's the type of fellows we've been getting in the fire department. But you sure can't fight a fire-- I don't care how good a firefighter you are-- if you haven't got any equipment.

So a while back, we started a project and got a decent engine house. And then we kept on going with replacing equipment, but oh, we still got a long way to go. You better believe it."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOE PADDOCK: One thing that's suggested here, though, that I think is key to discussing rural man is the heroic, the element of the heroic. And we talked quite often with people who unconsciously would start glowing when they could describe doing something that we thought was heroic.

Fellow by the name of Gunder Hoagland talked about being off on a duck hunting trip out by Wheaton, still out here on the prairies, coming back by train during the Armistice Blizzard. And the train they were on got stuck in a drift. And on the higher track above them a train was still going.

And so they transferred passengers from lower train to upper train. And the men would carry the women and children over through the drifts. And there was a sort of glow. This is probably what men did best over the ages, this pride in what a man could do.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In terms of the heroic things, I think we have some rich ritual possibilities left. Things like hunting and athletics where we have a chance to act out the heroic and struggle along these lines. This has been a healthy thing male psychology. And I guess that I have a poem that I wrote from a long book length. This is from a long book length poem which I called "The Way Home." And it says something about what I felt about hunting. And I had a long section on hunting, but I'll just read a few lines from it here.

"Hunting was a manly center.

Love of the hunt filled Me.

With eyes half shut you could have seen my aura, lives of the animals I killed.

When I was a boy, the streets of Litchfield on opening mornings of hunting seasons

were a khaki banner.

Life took a leap, hung a song in the air around the ears of men who knew no tunes.

That is now gone to a nervous, breathy humming and memories."

OK.

NANCY PADDOCK: There's a part in the oral history where H. J. Robertson is talking about a bunch of men that went hunting together. And this seemed to me a rather incredible amount of organization, almost a frightful amount.

JOE PADDOCK: It suggests, I think, the power of cooperation that man learned the power that's within it.

NANCY PADDOCK: There's the two sides, yes.

JOE PADDOCK: Yeah.

NANCY PADDOCK: "I'll just tell you about one time we organized in town to hunt a big field for pheasants. We got permission from [? Meehlhause ?] to hunt a field of his a mile across. And we were 50 hunters. I forget how many cars. We had about 10 or 12 cars.

The way we'd do it, everybody would get out except one man in each car. And he would drive around to the other end of the field to block. He'd get out at the end of that cornfield and stand there. When the drivers or pushers came through, the birds would jump up and fly over them, and they'd get a shot.

If they'd jumped close enough to the pushers, why, they'd get a shot. We started at 1:00, and I think we pulled in at 4:00 o'clock in the afternoon. And we piled the birds up on the sidewalk in front of what was [? Blix's ?] Barbershop. And [? Blix's ?] Barbershop, by the way, was the place where presidents and governors were elected or defeated.

Well, there was a crowd of people there, and we dumped all the birds. And we were entitled to three birds apiece. One could be a hen. So everybody picked up two roosters and a hen. And when they were done, there were three birds left. So we gave them to a man who didn't go along hunting. So there were 153 birds shot in four hours. That's just to give you an idea of how many pheasants there was, and how you could get them if you organized."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOE PADDOCK: Another ritualized area of being heroic that we've noticed a lot of in the rural men was pride in athletic prowess. And summertime was baseball time. And baseball, Class B baseball in the Maine out in Southwestern Minnesota with the smaller towns was very serious business. Everybody took it very seriously.

And big crowds showed up even in cow pastures, and they played very well. They weren't professional, but there were a lot of them that played like professionals do. And there was always somebody in the town they'd said, well, if he'd just get it together, he could go down and play with the pros big time and whatnot. And I suspect there's probably a little more to that than we all think. It's a lot harder than they think and in some ways it is.

But a lot of that means breaks and that sort of thing. And these people played very well. And the town was in a way held together. There was a lot of pride in the local baseball team, especially if they happen to have a good one. A while back we were down at Milroy. I had a chance to interview Bob [? Zwach. ?] And Milroy is very famous in Southwestern Minnesota as a baseball town.

Population 247 and yet they won the state Class B baseball tournament in 1954, and then went on to beat the Class A team. And they played good baseball. And talking with Bob, I really sensed that here was a true competitor. Here's one of those people that knew how to play the game and played it to the fine hair edge.

And I talked to him at first a little bit about the 1955 season where they went to, I believe, it was second in the state, but lost in the Class A division which they'd moved up to. And I asked him a little bit about that. And he says, no, we weren't choked up. We were veterans. The tougher it gets, the tougher we become. I really don't think we choked up at all.

And he goes back to discuss the 1954 team. In 1954, we played 33 ball games. We lost three, and two of them were exhibitions. We usually played two a week. So you could say it went on for 16 weeks that year. We won five straight games in 1954 to win the state championship.

In my last sermon when we were playing the last game to win the state championship, I told my boys, there's over 500 teams we've been playing against all year, and we're at least within one of the two best. We're going to win this one, so we're the best of 500.

I said, you can do something about it tonight. Tomorrow in the paper you see Milroy loses, that's no good. Tonight, get to work. And we beat those guys 4 to 3 to win the last game of the state championship. And I had the nicest bunch of guys. They were dedicated. They were hustlers. We played a fast running game. We bunt, we squeezed. We stole. We hit and run. We put the pressure on the other side.

Nine games out of ten, we scored the first run. When you score the first run, you got the other guys on the run. And he went on with this description. He told us some good humorous stories about baseball too, but I think this describes really the seriousness and the dedication with which some of these small town people played baseball.

And again, it was this desire to express power. It's they're burning all the time, and where are the opportunities? And the frustrations which arise, I think, in the male psyche when you don't have opportunities to express what you can do, or don't have the sort of training that's necessary to lead you into that sort of thing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I think one of the things we should bring out here, though, in terms of male point of view, the rural male point of view is that we're also talking about competition philosophically speaking. And it probably was a truth. It was competition was key to excellence and growth all the time.

And they believed in the value of this competition. Whether it was small town businessmen or the young baseball player that wanted to make the pros, that's the way you got good was getting in there and competing and mixing it up. And I think you'll find yet that your rural conservative political philosophy moves along these lines. Competition is the weak may fall by the side, but competition is the way things happen.

One of the people I interviewed was Sandra Pierson, who was a Chamber of Commerce man from way back. Now, he's very serious about chamber of Commerce and Olivia and what it's done for the town and where it's gone. And he feels that he's very proud of what's happening Olivia.

NANCY PADDOCK: "So the town was beginning to move. And with my volume going like it did, I saw that there was a chance to stay. There was a group of fellows that were constantly going ahead who weren't afraid to try something. There are not too many of that group that are left. Warren Haynes was a big cornerstone to our town. And Dr. Cosgriff was a big cornerstone to our town.

These were city fathers that were helping make things go. Elk River Concrete came into town, and then Remco Gas came in. SuperValu was remodeled. And, of course, when we think of SuperValu here, we think of Dale Anderson. He and his wife too were great partners and just grand people to be competitors with."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOE PADDOCK: There is a whole other area of expression of power too, I think. And these are some of them ritual and some of them social life in a spontaneous way. And these are what we think of now probably as macho areas. In the old days, we used to talk about as rowdy or sowing the wild oats and that sort of thing.

And it's sort of a celebration of the joy of power, the male beating his chest, or the old Mike Fink brag or something like that. And I think this could be either positive or negative. Some of it was ritually done in clubs of one sort or another, and other aspects of it were things like fights and the old time dances and stuff like that.

NANCY PADDOCK: There's a wonderful story that Frank [? Swoboda ?] tells about Rocky Mountain Oyster Feeds.

JOE PADDOCK: Does everybody know what Rocky Mountain Oyster Feeds are?

SPEAKER 1: Why, of course.

JOE PADDOCK: OK. I should probably tell people that this is the eating of testicles of animals. Cheap, mainly. Yes,

NANCY PADDOCK: Which has a certain male ritual inherent in it, I think. [LAUGHS]

JOE PADDOCK: Right.

NANCY PADDOCK: "Then there were Rocky Mountain Oyster Feeds, well, for lambs, not for hogs. I don't know of anybody ever ate hog. Well, it was never done in good society. I used to bring in a bunch down here to a gang in the legion, and we'd fry them. Drink beer and fry oysters.

God, you thought you were something. Whether it was good to do or not, I don't know. Well, they're good. Oh, God, yes. You mix up a batter and put them in there. Well, you could buy them. Not so much lamb as calf. Oh, I don't think they ever had them on the meat counter. You've got to order them. But they are served, oh, at stag dinners.

I suppose some of these higher class restaurants you can get them In the old days, when they used to have meat markets, just nothing but meat markets. But you don't get them anymore because these farmers pretty near all use emasculators or illustrators. Pinch them or else put a rubber on them. Even your beef people practically none of them castrate. And I've never heard of anybody eating hogs.

I don't know, that'd be the one you could get because that's still done that way. I imagine they'd be pretty good. But I suppose it's just the idea that you see it all originated on your range country. When I was agent out in North Dakota, there was a couple of big sheep ranches in that area.

And I'd have gone out there during docking and castrating season, and they'd bring in whole pans of those things during noon. And all the hands would sit down and think they were delicious. Well, they were. I have eaten many of them."

JOE PADDOCK: OK, so this is a prime male ritual, and women are never invited to these. I've never been aware of women invited to a Rocky Mountain Oysters Fry.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There are lots of rowdy goings on that relate to Legion Club activities. I remember Billy Moran telling me a story, reminds me of my old poem about Kings [? Rider ?] and McGraw. Bill said that the Legion Club in Olivia was losing membership, and they didn't know what to do.

So they started up an argument between he and one of the members. And after the argument became well known around the town that Bill was trying to get this man ejected from the Legion Club, they had some meeting at the Legion Club.

At that meeting, Bill starts apologizing, and the man won't accept the apology. Pulls out a pistol, blanks in it, shoots Bill. Bill falls over backwards over a chair, then crawls on his hands and knees out the back door. And then they run downstairs and meet down there where they're having a drink. Meanwhile, all the aghast people come running downstairs trying to wonder what's happened. And they're having this drink together.

It was this big prank that they put on to draw attention to the Legion Club, and they got a lot more enthusiasm. But again, that's the sort of thing that the women's clubs probably wouldn't have done. And it's the sort of thing that the men love. There was joy in their blood.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Men became very harsh and very tough. And I've written poems about this type off and on. They're a type that I used to witness quite a lot in my growing up, boyhood. And I have a poem which I call "The Sacrifice," which is about a couple of men that were like this. One of the most illegal poaching things that men used to do was to dig out mink with the use of a dog.

And mink used to be worth quite a lot of money back around 1950. And game wardens used to be very harsh on this. And one of the things they sometimes did was go up and shoot the dog of the digger right on the spot. Apparently, it was legal at that time. This is called "The Sacrifice."

"There's no doubt it was illegal.

The price of pelts was high.

And Augie [? Radke ?] was dogging mink that winter,

eking a bit of richness from the frozen swamps.

And Jess was digging one from its den when Henry heard our game warden came upon them.

Augie and his black dog, Bender, with mink musk sweet in the air around them.

No doubt Henry's golden lab Winger had his nose in the hole too.

When Henry shot Bender through the back of his head,

a head which contained, doubt, a mind blossom of mink within its jaws.

And so that blood which now flowed smoking into the cold snow

between teeth which gripped a root was somehow both blood of hunter and blood of quarry.

[? Radke ?] said, Henry, that ought to stop your tunneling after every scrap of fur in Meeker County.

And no doubt it had been decided somewhere over coffee and reports that that was the quickest way to stop a digger.

But who would have guessed Augie would touch the muzzle of his 22 to the neck of Winger and pull the trigger.

Winger that innocent appendage of Henry over 8 long years lying there, snarling his blood into the snow.

That's as much of the story as I heard. The only witness was the chilling wind.

I can only guess about that pair, standing there with guns in their big red hands, their dogs dead on the snow between them."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NANCY PADDOCK: There was one kind of fight that we heard about from Stanley Schnelli. And in a sense, it was both harsh and really very humorous because no one got hurt too bad. They were having a barn dance down there at Morton. I don't know who got the bright idea. You seen those big doors that they let down to put hay in a barn. Well, they had an orchestra setting out on that.

The haymow floor was all cleaned out, and they was dancing on that. And I don't know who got the bright idea about cutting the rope or untying it. I don't know which he done, but he dropped that orchestra down outside. Oh, there was a hell of a fight out there.

We got out of there, though, when they done that. We didn't want none of that Morton trouble. We had trouble enough of our own up here in Olivia.

JOE PADDOCK: And there is that joy in that that if we ever sterilize that sort of rowdiness out of our blood, I think the world will be a little less rich for it in some ways.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The hobo used to be a very common man in Southwestern Minnesota. And these were men that for one reason or another didn't, I guess, fit into the larger structure. Weren't willing to perhaps. We have maybe the Woody Guthrie type who was responsible to the culture in the long run, but who didn't want to be a day laborer or something like that.

NANCY PADDOCK: I suppose a lot of them were refugees from unhappy home situations and found no other way out of them except to just travel around.

JOE PADDOCK: It was riding the rods was one thing you did when you were unwilling to become part of the community. And then, of course, during the depression years, there were a lot of people that had no choice. And I suppose, the hoboing hit its peak at that time. But Lambert Visser told a little bit about old dad Buckley. He told me also about a hobo by the name of Shelley. And he was talking about the hobos that would come through.

"Yeah, some place a bunch of damn hobos would be laying down by the trees under the shade. And the farmer needed them at harvest time, you'd drive uptown and get one. Yeah, sometimes they got good ones and sometimes they wasn't worth breakfast. We had a good one, I remember down in the country out there.

He came every year at the same time. His name was Shelley. He was a real man. And all his money, cash, he put it in his sock. One time, he was sitting on the post there, and he pulled a wad out of his sock. $800 in cash in his sock. He stuck on. He never left.

When he was all done thrashing, the last bundle had went through the machine, he took his straw hat, and it went right through the machine into lettuce. Straw hat, yeah. Then he put on his cap again, and he was ready for another trip. He was hobo, yeah. He came every year. He was the cleanest man you ever seen. And some of the guys was dirty and not Shelley. He cleaned and washes himself. Took a bath every once in a while.

And when he got some more money, he just stuff it in his socks. Once in a while, he would tell us stories about where he'd been. Kids used to sit around him when he was telling those stories. They wasn't all so, I don't think."

[LAUGHS]

To some extent, we're moving into the realm of the cowboy hero now too, the lonely man and the drifter.

NANCY PADDOCK: Comes in off the plains and does his work and then goes off into the sunset.

JOE PADDOCK: Doesn't tame the town the way the community poets do but--

[LAUGHTER]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

VICKIE STURGEON: You've been listening to The Poet's Perspective, a series of nine programs funded in part by the Minnesota Humanities Commission. The program featured Southwest Minnesota regional poets Joe and Nancy Paddock. And the series was produced in the Worthington Studios of Minnesota Public Radio station KRSW. Staff members at KRSW responsible for the project were Kim and Judy Hodgson. And I'm Vicki Sturgeon.