Saturday mornings around here often finds us searching out two or three garage sales; it’s not that we need anything, but the thrill of the hunt supersedes any needs. And, it is only once or twice during a summer that we stumble upon choice items. The treasure I uncovered last Saturday may have been my allotment for the year, and I found it in the unlikely place of a recently closed farm implement building on main street. Odds and ends of that business were being offered as well as household items that had been brought in. There, neatly placed on shelves were a couple hundred older hardcover books from which I chose two. One of them, a history entitled Red River Runs North!, contains information I had not run across before about my historical research interest of ox-cart freighting. A wealth of facts in it will feed my writing project regarding the trail from Fort Abercrombie to Fort Ransom.
The other find grabbing my attention that day was an autobiography written by North Dakota’s own Eric Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream. I find Sevareid’s writing pretty irresistible; how can an old farm boy not keep reading after scanning the first two lines of chapter one: “The small brown river curved around the edge of our town. The farmers plowed close to its muddy banks and left their water jugs in the shade of the willows.” Having read this book previously, I am familiar with his story. It is this book that carries the oft-quoted passage regarding how people reacted when he told them he hailed from North Dakota. To them this state “… was a large, rectangular blank spot in the nation’s mind.”
Sevareid’s use of the English language was superb! I still remember his radio and television commentaries and how precisely his two minute’s worth of words described his topic of the day. Whenever he started talking I usually stopped to listen, and since it’s been a number of years since last I read him, I’m enjoying his penned words all over again.
As a young man he demonstrated an adventurous spirit and the places he went and the enviable experiences he gained shaped his world view and influenced his professional life. He was present in Europe working as a news correspondent prior to and during World War II and sent out breaking stories and bulletins, a feat few other correspondents were able to accomplish. He’d beg or bluster his way through the management of radio stations and get small doses of airtime to inform the world what Hitler was doing at the outset of this period. His report was the first indication to the outside world that France had capitulated, offering little resistance to the Nazi army. When things started getting dicey for him and his family he knew he had to get his wife and one week old twin boys out of Paris and safely home to the United States. That story alone raises goose bumps when he found out that procuring transportation made him compete with the thousands of refugees who wanted a place on available ships, too. After a time when he knew his own life to be in danger, he made his way to England to find and report to his boss Edward R. Murrow. He had left Paris without permission, something I suppose most of us would do if our lives were in danger, but worried whether or not Murrow might fire him for insubordination. Murrow’s response to the contrary, “This is the best news I’ve had for a long time … You have pulled off one of the greatest broadcasting feats there ever was.”
The book is long and wordy, but I enjoy every page of this great writer. A symposium on Eric Sevareid will be held in Bismarck next April, and a one night lecture is scheduled at the Heritage Center in November. I plan to attend both events.
