~* Large Print Treasures 1 *~
Small world even then
Movie: MGM Cinerama Dec 31 1962; Book: Louis L'Amour 1988
1840ish. Large orchestras play majestic Cinerama wagon train or starship music while covered wagons trickle westward past bewildered, hostile Indians and stampeding buffalo towards Manifest Destiny. Selling their New England farm, the Prescotts travel by barge down the newly built Erie Canal, joining the Harvey family rafting down the Ohio River while others like them travel west by more southerly routes such as the Natchez Trace and the Santa Fe Trail. Tragedy strikes the Prescotts before they reach St. Louis. The family splits up according to individual dreams and circumstance. It's still a small world even then with families, friends, business associates and enemies bumping into each other in the vast, open country of those days. An all-star Hollywood cast including John Wayne renacts these classic, beloved episodes of American history, the stuff Star Trek is based on.
1803's Louisiana Purchase brings Lewis and Clark, followed by intrepid, buckskin-clad trappers and mountain men born in the century before. Covered wagon trains bring immigrants and settlers. Post-Civil War railroads, making cross-country travel faster, easier and safer, bring land speculators and camp-following outlaws. This highly readable page-turner segues from adventure to adventure without dragging even once, making history-loving readers beg for more.
Back to the farm
Howard Kohn
1876. German family farms are no longer divisible. Heinrich Kohn, 21, works and saves in Berlin to cross the Atlantic and build his own farm in eastern Michingan's Saginaw Valley, on the Lake Huron side of the state, across the lake from Canada. The farm passes to his eldest son Johann and then to Johann's oldest son Frederich, who inherits and passes on his family's thriftiness, practicality and sense of humor and justice. Frederich's oldest son Howard leaves the farm for a career in writing. Howard and his second wife Diana shuttle back and forth between Washington DC and Michigan, exploring his father's story and finding his own.
It's not agriculture nowadays. It's agribusiness. The nuclear plant closes but Dow Chemical survives, employing half the town, while oil rights resellers browbeat door to door drilling and leaving holes in everybody's farm but Fred Kohn's. Farm children are trained from preschool for a "better life" in the city. Despite such odds, family farms survive as long as there's farm children growing up who love farming more than anything else. There's much to be learned about farming in this book, especially about crops and chickens. Kohn and his neighbors sold their dairy cows after the cheese plant closed and dairy products were imported from California.
The Kohns, like their neighbors whose families arrived with Heinrich, are close-knit. We follow them all on the farm and in town and church, living their lives and leaving their records. Fred Kohn pulls out bills from 40 years ago and compares prices then and now. After selling the farm to carefully chosen neighbors who would appreciate and care for it, Fred Kohn's blood pressure returns to normal as he and his wife Clara travel about the country visiting their children.
In this highly readable, entertaining and educational book we learn about bean count numbers in which lower numbers mean higher quality and higher take-home pay for the farmer. We learn how tractors and combines are used to plant and harvest crops. We learn how chicken feed is ground and how chicken coops are kept clean and frost-free. We learn that tree stumps removed with chemicals render the land around them unarable. We learn that garage sale proceeds of items dating from before 1933, the year income tax began, aren't taxable. We learn about the protestant work ethic and German Lutheran farmers' culture and beliefs. California does lead the country in dairies and in number of farms because of its larger size but Michigan and the Midwest farm belt are still to be stared fascinated at.
1930s Michigan
Glenn Swarthout
At 13 during the 1930s depression, Swarthout's parents sent him by train alone from their home in Philadelphia to live with his mother's parents Ella and Will Chubb, on their farm in Howell, Michigan, where they raised chickens and sheep. That fall was eventful. In October the town church burned down because of faulty wiring. Farmers helped build a new one by December, before heavy snow began. At the same timeone of their old sheep was pregnant. December snow didn't arrive. Farm life went on, with chores done in the middle of winter snowstorms.
April 1863. Great-grandfather Ephraim Chubb stopped plowing in midfurrow to tell Sarah, his bride of two years, that he was going off to war. She gave her consent without telling her husband that she was pregnant with her son Will. A week after Will left with the cavalry the melodeon arrived from Howell, a present from Will to Sarah for letting him go. Years later she taught Will and his own wife Ella to play. Will, wanting to play the melodeon for his father, never played again because his father was killed in action, never to return home.
"Will the tractor start?" asked Will. Ella wanted to give the old melodeon to the church for Christmas. The book continues on about the struggle to haul the organ to the church in time for Christmas morning services, along with help from neighbors after the reluctant old tractor quit. Their children rode on the sled berhind with the organ. In town a mysterious rider helped them move the organ the last few feet to the church and inside, then disappeared into the winter mist as quickly as he had appeared. The following spring reunited the family in Heaven while the melodeon played for them here on Earth.
Author of several novels made into movies, Swarthout after waiting several years before he felt ready, at last wrote this true story before his 54th Christmas.
Football Fever
H G Bissinger
High school confidential. Indiana had basketball. Minnesota had hockey. Odessa, just west of Midland in the middle of the west Texas plain, had high school football. Established in the 1880s by Ohio speculators and auctioned off 350 miles from town, Odessa proved them right when it sprouted oil right in the middle of nowhere. Then came the oil bust and the town went broke after spending big money on yachts, villas and Rolls Royces. In the 1950s, outdated equipment littered roadsides of a redneck town where girls' sports and desegregation still were unknown.
At Permian High School, named for Odessa's Permian era oil deposits, football was king. Money went to athletic tape for the team while the head of the English department earned 2/3 as much as the football coach and had to beg the Booster Club and local business owners for everything except its battered textbooks.
Businesses closed and streets emptied as everyone gathered for the first official day of football practice. It was SRO at the annual fundraising watermelon feed. Turnout was high. Traffic was bumper to bumper for away games. The Permain Panthers spirit squad of Pepettes, an elite group of senior girls, supported all the teams but supported football more. Each was assigned a player, and wore his number on her jersey. Pepettes baked cookies each week before the game. They put signs on each player's front lawn so the whole world would know a Permian football player lived there. Posters went up in the halls and moved to the gym for Friday morning pep rallies. In addition, the girls made scrapbooks and did other things for their players, often not even thanked for. After all, Panther football ranked 4th in the state that year and had their invincibility to uphold. A losing coach soon found for sale signs on his front lawn, embarrassing even his family.
James Boobie Miles, coming from Houston to live with his uncle L V Miles, was the pampered star running back until a knee injury ended his career. Gone were hopes of college and professional football. After quitting Permian's team rather than remain on the sidelines the rest of the season, Boobie finally accepted a nearby community college football scholarship. Other players and their style of play are profiled following the chapter on Boobie. All are followed closely as the season progresses. The whole town knows Permian, the last frontier, will win the state championship this year. A secret meeting took place at a roadside restaurant to toss the coin to decide which two of three teams could go on to the playoffs. The parking lot soon filled with cars, pickup trucks, and vans filled with noisy fans ready to riot at a moment's notice.
Senior players graduated and went their separate ways. Some went college and maybe pro, some went to prison, some went to work. Next year another football team would take the field as Permian's knights in black and white armor and football fever would begin anew.
Bissinger lived in Odessa during 1988. He and his wife voted there and sent their kids to school there. Yet for all the excitement and lasting friendships he forgets to tell us how Boobie Miles came to be called Boobie.
Where? There! Or maybe . . . there?
Robert Macneil
Follow the MacNeil half of PBS' MacNeil and Lehrer report from his early days as a radio announcer - dick jockey - in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His first big news story was the death of England's King George VI, father of Queen Elizabeth II, successor to England's throne. Then came more stories from England, home of the still popular 1500s childrens' song Oranges and Lemons, and a job as a Reuters foreign correspondent with worldwide travel MacNeil, then a bachelor, became addicted to. Days were spent reporting and nights were spent partying, starting with exciting nights in the dark alleys of Morocco's famous Casbah, where he was often captured and escorted to its many souvenir shops. Chasing breaking news and feature stories covering everything from wars of independence in Africa's Congo and other now-former European colonies, with loud gunfire in the background as he phoned his stories in, to Soviet takeover in eastern Europe and the 1950s McCarthy era in the United States, and on to President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas and the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald in Fort Worth, and Viet Nam War era antiwar protests from Paris to Berkeley, California.
MacNeil recalls narrow escapes on dangerous wartime news missions, interviews with , and other unexpected adventures just around the corner for an inquisitive reporter on assignment.
"A reporter's life is full of frustrations," MacNeil says. After cutting his teeth on popular British authors, moving on to other famous world figures of the day, his interviews with Charlie Chaplin in Switzerland and with Iran's Ayatollah Khoemini both fizzled. MacNeil and other Western journalists became Fidel Castro's guests, prisoners in Havana's Capri Hotel with armed guards in the halls outside to keep them from covering Cuba's missile crisis. His diary and notes were confiscated. An inventory of his room showed products from all over the Communist world.
The decision to write this and other books came in 1966 when MacNeil with his family driving to a carefree Long Island summer picnic met a passing hearse containing the casket of a Marine killed in Viet Nam. MacNeil remains Canadian, retaining the passport that saved his life many times from enemies looking for American hostages. Now married with kids, he's in Washington DC and still misses traveling the globe as a news correspondent.
Award-winning actress
Diana Maychick
March 25, 1954. The cold, windy Manhattan night Audrey Hepburn wins the Oscar for Roman Holiday and the Tony for Ondine. Born in Brussels May 4, 1929 and educated in English boarding schools, Audrey lived in poverty after her father embezzled her mother's family fortune. Her mother divorced him and took her to Amsterdam, where she waited in hiding for the war to end. At first aspitring to ballet, Audrey turned to acting to support herself and her mother.
Preferring life at home raising her children, Audrey returned to stage and screen when she needed the money. Some of her movies she enjoyed doing, others she hated. Some of her costars became friends, others remained enemies. Humphrey Bogart hated Audrey because the role of Sabrina in 1954 went to her instead of to to Lauren Bacall. He later grudgingly admired her, realizing at last that she had no hand in the decision. Surviving two bad marriages she raised her two sons virtually alone.
It's said that true love only comes at the end of one's life. Sure enough she spent her last five years joyously with Dutch-speaking former actor Robert Wolders, widower of Washington socialite Merle Oberon. Wolders was the only man Audrey brought home that her nmother liked, got along with and didn't throw out of her house. Audrey also spent the time doing what she loved best, volunteering for UNICEF.
Hepburn proved a willing interviewee several times during the writing of this book. Many others in and out of her life supplied information about her too. Her death from cancer on Jan 27, 1993, left not only sorrow but also many questions forever unanswered.
Chinese odyssey
Bette Bao Lord
After writing about her younger sister's life and emigration from China, Lord returns as the wife of Winston Lord, United States ambassador to China. here she recounts personal accounts of family, friends and strangers. Students, teachers, civil servants, soldiers, and the elderly anonymously recall their difficult lives in China and their parts in Communist Chinese events and movenments, remaining cheerful throughout. Some were Red Guards during Chairman Mao's 1950s Cultural Revolution, others were prisoners. Some worked on farms and some worked in factories. All were afraid to be seen with an American, especially a writer, either alone with her or with others to serve as witnesses to the innocuousness of their conversations.
Police refuse to arrest people who they deem aren't lawbreakers. Prison guards smile at inmates' TVs, radios, books and carpets they bought and the swimming pool they built and paid for personally. Fathers recall children who don't remember tham after years of separation. Teachers recall Red Guards' raids and their time spent as prisoners. Students recall Tienamen Square and attending college in the United States. These are the legacies of China as it was when Lord visited China from 1985 to 1989 when her husband resigned as ambassador to China and stayed until a new ambassador was found.
North Sea journey
A Alvarez
Oil. Now found in 1969 in the North Sea, between Scotland, Norway and the Shetlands. Late 1980s and latest technology the U K is rich! At least its bills are paid, putting food on tables and heating homes in winter. To meet the workmen involved and see how this fabulous oil is extracted, A Alvarez journeyed to the offshore wells floating on hundreds of feet of Arctic sea. Helicopters service a regular shuttle bus route transporting the men to and from their jobs in two-week shifts. Engineers and other passengers are included. All must wear bright orange survival suits for the ride.
Women aren't welcome. Men working there to get away from their wives still spend their paychecks on pornography and paper office walls with naked oil company calendar women. The lone Scottish-burred female office worker there from Aberdeen to get a closer look at her work can't wait to leave. Many of the men aquired their skills as soldiers, used to following orders. They think nothing of climbing high above the surface or riding the lift to deep inside the platform's legs to monitor the many oil pipes with their large arrays of dials and switches. The whole platform lights up like a Christmas tree, with its orange gas outlet flame seen from large distances.
Aberdeen, the granite city. The beach. Half in, half out of today. Kept rich over centuries with fishing, whaling, shipbuilding, textiles, farms and cattle, and of course the granite from which their homes are built. Nowadays there's oil. Two story office buildings with narrow halls filled with closed doors.
Shetland Islands. Three buses a week now instead of just two, from its northern oil terminal Sullom Voe south to Lerwick, its capitol. All sheep, close-cropped grass, marshland and rocks and scattered shepherds' crofts but no trees. Dirt roads end abruptly in nowhere. Conversationless, independent people are there when help is needed, then drive off silently into the sunset. Lowlanders fall in love with the place and stay. Young men seeking work turn from fishing, fish processing and textiles to big-money oil. There being a finite amount of it is left for future generations and sci-fi writers to worry about.
Alvarez concluded his personal journey aboard the safety boat Stadive which also serves as a dive boat. Tethered, closely monitored divers continually inspect, repair and clean barnacles from the platform's legs while men work the platforms and make oil flow steadily to the beach for processing. After all, why have incomes but for wine, women and song? Welcomed aboard and shown around the facilities, taken seriously as another good, affable bloke, Alvarez has lots of notes to take home. He meets fresh crowds of workmen on their way offshore as he returns home again to London to rejoin his family and write his book.
Long Distance
Eric Newby
New Year's Eve, 1964. Newby and his wife head for home from Moscow's Yaroslavl Station as the Trans-Siberian train pulls out, headed for Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean after dropping off foreigners at Nakhodka and the ferry to Yokohama. It's 1977 and the Newbys along with photographer Otto and Agency man Mischa take the trip across 6000 miles, 7 time zones, several oblasts or economic districts. Food and drink the West would condemn, and conductresses putting hands in front of cameras pointed at forbidden subjects (the list grows) Newby still maintains his sense of humor in this tale of an 8-day trip with a few stops along the way. Included are tales of cruelty toward slave labor building the railway in the late 1800s. Most of the cities were established by Cossacks in the 1600s as forts built to control peasants and exact tributes of furs for the czar. Today's population is farmers, holiday fishermen, school girls from the local dance school welcoming trains and seeing them off, and women railway workers greasing the tracks. This book provides a good picture of how foreigners traveled through Russia and Siberia during the Soviet era.
How the world was then
Danny Danziger and Robert Lacey
A closer look at life around the turn of the first millennium. Each month in turn with drawings from the Julius work calendar, perhaps the only writing surviving writing from this era. Other writing was destroyed during the reign of Henry VIII as sinful. Actually it's the year 1020 when this calendar was made. A 16th century book collector retrieved it when Henry VIII closed England's monasteries. After centuries in his library it's now in the British History Museum. Its purpose was to mark the year's relligious feast days and holy days with 365 lines of Latin verse marking the Christian year month by month. It's little different from today's calendars. They were taller but their livestock was smaller than during Roman times because animal husbandry and selective breeding was of no interest to them. Instead of only 4 oxen their teams required 8 or 10 half-starved animals. Each month has its own topic: health, women, saints, food, and on to a December unlike Decembers today.
I enjoyed this book. It gives an interesting, readable look at the world, or England at laset, about 1,000 years ago.
World of Green
Gerald Durrell
This book is incomplete, our mission a failure, says Durrell. In 1953 Durrell and his wife Jacqui spent 6 months in South America collecting small animals and birds for the British Zoo. Stopping first in Argentina their next stop was Paraguay, collecting for British zoos. They were outside the morning after their arrival in Argentina, looking for animals, impressing their hosts. When Revolution forced their fast exit out of Paraguay they had to leave most of their animals behind. Even some of their clothes had to be left behind. Was the trip a failure? I disagree. This author was a real man who loves his wife and includes her in his work. The first illustration shows her feeding a monkey from her hand. They had help whenever needed from friends eager to assist them. Their money wasn't depleted by hotel bills like most travelers' money is. I'd say their trip was a success. Besides they got this fine, well-written book out of it.
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Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux
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