Buggies and Blues

Mandan hosts an annual event called "Buggies and Blues" and it draws lots of cars and people. Main street is closed off so classic cars could park in double file for about nine blocks. Plus two or three of the side streets joining main street contain classic cars, too. The estimated number of cars is usually around 500, and just to make it interesting quite a few classic farm tractors sit on display, too. Under the bandshell live bands play and food and drink vendors sell their products. Other vendors set up on the sidewalk selling things such as model cars, services for body work and painting, collectible license plates, etc.

The Fairlane is owned by an old Sheldonite, Larry Strand, who takes a lot of pride in his vehicle. I think he comes every year. Because of the flooding the usual date of the car show had to moved to this July date. I kidded Larry about going through withdrawals when he and his fellow owners couldn't show in June. "Yeah," he said laughing, "I got the shakes!"

I remembered George Bunn when I saw this car. His parents owned one that looked like it - maybe a four-door, though - and I got to ride with him once in awhile on Saturday night. It was one nice riding car! Car lovers are a pretty nostalgic bunch.

How I loved these Mustangs when they came out the summer I graduated from college. I made up my mind to get one and pay monthly payments. Wouldn't you know it, Ford went on strike then and didn't produce them for awhile. So I bought an plain Jane of a '62 Ford. I had to wait until I got married to get a Mustang. Mary brought hers to our union, a '65 fastback model.

The sun beat down pretty hard and shade felt pretty good, but the heat didn't stop the crowd from showing up. I'll just bet there will be another Buggies and Blues next year.

Old Truths

I finally got around to reading the classic western tale of The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. It tells of a rush to judgment with the report of a rancher's murder and the rustling of his cattle. As the story progresses rumors fly and the strong hot-heads intimidate others to follow along with their quest to find the wrong-doers and punish them. The sheriff is out of town and the "mob" is all right with that; they will take care of the problem without the backing of the law. After riding several hours in the dark the group finds three men with a small herd of cattle. The leader of the three tries to convince the posse that the seller of these cattle promised to send the bill of sale, but without it no amount of arguing convinces them of their innocence, and they are hung from a tree. Soon the sheriff and the "murdered" rancher show up to tell them of the mistake the mob has made, and the story ends with feelings of guilt and denial of participation in the affair.

I wonder how different is the reaction of the mob in the book from the groups in today's political scene. With so many "experts" spouting wisdom without letting facts get in the way of a good prejudice the mob follows along. It takes work and concentration to ferret out the facts of any case and most people are not willing to put it out.

Minneapolis Weekend

The grandkids keep growing, changing each time we see them. We went to Minneapolis this weekend to spend some time with them while their mother attended a workshop in Ann Arbor, MI. My computer had all kinds of connectivity problems so I never got this posted earlier. We are home now in Mandan, tired, and looking out the windows at hail damage on Mary's flowers.

Lucas is 5 years old and involved with various activities and exhibits much intellectual curiosity. He loves t-ball, swimming, and gymnastics. :)

Lily is 2 1/2 now and talks better than anyone I know with a pacifier in her mouth. She exhibits a great ability to stand up for herself against her older brother. :)

We spent a short time at the arboretum which by the way is a fantastic place. Beautiful gardens
abound and several weddings were being held to take advantage of the scenery. Unfortunately it was hot and humid so it was a bit uncomfortable. The University of Minnesota maintains the facility and in addition to opening the grounds to the public (for a fee) conduct plant experimentation there.

The house constructed from twigs and vines greets visitors first thing. Quite large, an adult does not need to duck down when walking through the entrance.

The World Changes

I started driving a car of this year, make, and model when I was 14 years old. It was the family automobile, and I learned to drive it mostly with my mother sitting beside me since I had begged her to let me do it. Driving a car never proved much of a challenge to farm boys like me who had been sitting on a tractor already for several years. The only real difference - the car went faster.
I still remember taking my driver's test in the county seat of Lisbon. With my permit, I had gotten a small booklet to study which I did, diligently. The day of the test a big, uniformed highway patrolman got in the car with me and we were off. I think he gigged me on one little item, but then, isn't that the way it is with people in power? They need to find a little fault to justify their position.

Cars have changed a great deal since this one. I remember how it rattled on washboard roads, how poor a winter starter it was, and how it leaked dust. Dad liked it, though, because the lip of the trunk was cut low and he could easily lift cream cans in and out, and hauling the cream to town was a very important activity in those days. The cream check, our only steady cash flow, represented grocery money on Saturday night.

After many years, the merchants started promoting a new idea. They wanted more weekend time for themselves, something they didn't have with Saturday night openings. Thus Friday night openings came about, and that little action accompanied the death of the little farm towns, it seems to me. A bit of the nostalgia died then since a Saturday night bath always took us into Sunday leisure activities and then through the rest of the week to the next Saturday. Of course, taking baths in the galvanized washtub is another story.

Getting Reacquainted

Since joining the Western Writers of America, I have been looking at their reading lists to see what they define as good western genre writing. I have read many of them , but some of them I have not, and I am enjoying them now. Something I think is very interesting is that some of these stories are quite short, either in the novella form or the short story form. A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean and Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison are both written as novellas. A woman writer, Dorothy M. Johnson, wrote short stories with very familiar titles that earned lots of respect: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and A Man Called Horse. Another famliar short novella is Brokeback Mountain.

An interesting point is that an excellent full-length movie has been made from each of these short works of literature. Put a solid story in the hands of a screen writer and he can work wonders. The Liberty Valence story is quite short, but there is so much packed into it, and in re-reading it I see where the screen writers got their inspiration.

Reading stories based on western themes, both old-time and contemporary, feels very comfortable for me. Too much of the "good stuff" as determined by critics comes from the east coast where all the intellectual snobs congregate.

Sad Day

One day this past week a Bismarck police officer was slain at the scene of a domestic disturbance call. He and his partner approached a car holding a man against whom his girlfriend had called the cops for holding a knife on her. When the police got close the man fired his gun and killed the officer. His partner in turn shot and wounded the killer. It was a sad affair with the policeman having four kids at ho me and had planned to retire in another year.

The funeral was held Thursday in the Bismarck Civic Center so as to accommodate the large crowd which one of the TV stations estimated at 1800. He was buried at the North Dakota Veteran's Cemetery and the mourners passed within one block of our home. I went down to the highway to watch the long cavalcade of cars. It was reported 120 agencies were represented, each having its car lights in full blinking mode. Many of the agencies drove several cars so I can only think there were 200-250 vehicles. I made a mental note of where they came from, and I'm sure most of the communities in the state sent a patrol car, several from Minnesota included Minneapolis, Duluth, Eagan, Moorhead, and a couple of unfamiliar Minnesota counties, several from South Dakota, college campus police, Indian reservations, unmarked cars with their hidden lights in their grilles blinking, etc. It was quite a show for a man who died much too young in an uncalled for situation.

Something from the Old Days

One hundred years ago in the old hometown harvest hands and hoboes started gathering to find work on farms around the community. Apparently a little heavier influx of men came looking to work that year because of a crop failure in South Dakota. They came mostly by train and not with a paid ticket either. They started coming in June as reported in The Progress and were hanging out in the stockyard just west of town. The editor referred to them as "the side door Pullman class," and each man cooked for himself on an open fire.

Now, in July, the editor wrote "Laborers are arriving on every train and those who want to work are finding no difficulty in obtaining employment. There are the usual number of hoboes among them who are not looking for anything that means labor. At Oakes Tuesday seventy-five harvest hands captured a freight train and forced the train officials to take them to Jamestown. The Oakes authorities attempted to arrest the men, but the hoboes were too many for them."

The village of Sheldon must have felt some threat because of this influx of strangers and hired a night watchman. "Jim has a policeman star something less than six inches in diameter but he doesn't wear it where it can be seen. He also carries a gun and is going to get a club. When fitted out he will make a typical Irish cop."

Songs and stories have been written about these workers, itinerant mostly because they had no choice, if they wanted to eat they had to go find it. Seasonal labor offered the only jobs for them. John Steinbeck, Jimmie Rodgers, and Woody Guthrie easily come to mind as being good spokesmen for the times. Jimmie Rodgers, not to be confused with the rock and roll era Jimmie Rodgers, wore several nicknames: The Singing Brakeman, and The Blue Yodeler, and the Father of Country Music. Some lines from his song Waiting for a Train: "All around the water tank/ Waiting for a train/ A thousand miles away from home/ Sleeping in the rain..." It was a hard life for these men.

I couldn't resist finding a picture of an old engine with the steam and smoke pouring out of her. It has been a long time since I've seen one, but I've never forgotten. When a freight train headed southeast of Enderlin it had to climb a grade and the clouds really poured from these engines then when they had to work extra hard.

Monday Morning Pieces

Our yard could be a palette for a painting if I wanted to paint it. Most every kind of color shows up in it, and I get to enjoy it without doing any of the work. That is Mary's hobby, I mow the grass, that's enough.
Speaking of mowing the grass here is a picture of my grandpa with his team hitched to a mower. That's the way it used to be done. When I look at it I think of sweat, flies, hot sun, etc. The physical labor is pretty much removed from the job now, but this year the problem is getting it cut and baled between rain showers. My office wall is covered with pictures like Grandpa's, luckily I was able to find the snapshots in family photo albums. Now with all of our computerized gimmicks we can save, enlarge, post to internet locations like this one, and more.

Friend Garden Cleaner, pictured in the last post, lies at the side of the highway between here and downtown. Roadkill, he got in someone's headlights, I presume, and that's that. However, there's always another to take his place.

A good editorial in yesterday's paper: the editor quoted a California journalist friend who said, "If we report the words but don't scrutinize them, are we public watchdogs or public lapdogs, mere conduits for folks with self-serving messages?" I immediately thought of the blather coming out of the mouths of our state politicians who kept saying how they will bring relief, rain fire and hell down on the Corps of Engineers for letting this happen, and otherwise show how good it is that we trusted them to represent us. (In regards to the flood) Yah, sure, you betcha'.

Garden Interest

It happened again yesterday, two strangers rang the doorbell asking questions about the flowers in Mary's garden. I'm dumb as a fencepost regarding such matters and to answer their question I had to call Mary at her dad's to find out. I walk behind a lawnmower, that's all.


This morning Mary stated, "I went to pick my spinach leaves and something ate them all off." I think the culprit is the fellow below. A little later, she said, "That devil ate off all the blossoms on my potato plants." And this is in the city limits, but then an animal doesn't pay much attention to lines drawn on a map.

I keep busy doing my thing reading and writing. I finally got moving on a project that's been waiting for me for a long time. In 1867 a wagon train returning empty from hauling freight to Fort Ransom was enroute to Fort Abercrombie when it got caught in a December blizzard for three days just southeast of Lisbon. The project format is written as a historical fiction short story. Here is an excerpt from the story:

We had to stop the bull train; the wind drove the snow in brisk gales and enclosed us in a small, white bowl from which we could not see beyond to the next wagon. Our usual task of parking wagons proved next to impossible since we could not see or hear the wagon boss, and by the time he rode back within earshot hollering and screaming, the train sat in muddled disarray. With the oxen needing attention we unhitched but kept them yoked together and tethered to the wagons so they would not drift across the prairie with the wind at their tails.

Hunkering down for the night we tried to light cook fires, but every time a man's shaking hands struck a match or flint to steel the wind snuffed it out. More than anything I wanted to wrap my cold fingers around a cup of hot coffee, but tonight there would be none. Chewing on hardtack I tried to think of other places. By morning we would roll again, so all any of us could do now was to try to get some sleep. But it was no use, the blankets did little to chase the chill, and we had to lay there all night listening to the wind rip and slap the wagon canvas.

Ghost Towns

On the 4th one of the stops we made was in the near-ghost town of Raleigh. On the day before the Sunday Bismarck Tribune carried a reference to a website established by two Fargo men: www.ghostsofnorthdakota.com. In it they go around to old town sites that have become abandoned or nearly so, take photographs, and write a short narrative. I found it interesting, but I have my own little online publication here and submit a few of the photos I took in Raleigh.


We had a little clipper mill like this at home, and I remember cleaning seed grain with it. To keep count of the number of bushels cleaned we'd pencil hash marks on the granary door, vertical for the first four bushels, then a diagonal through them for the fifth, and so on. A collection of interchangeable sieves were necessary to use it properly; grates on each one were of different sizes to accommodate whatever size of kernels we were cleaning

Thank goodness I never had to work around one of these. Constructed of wood, this one must really have been old. One of my early memories was of a hired man who picked me up and teased me about throwing me in, just like they were tossing shocks of grain in. I was scared, and I remember Dad telling him to stop.


Dad received quite a serious injury while a young lad riding a horse-drawn disc like this. He related as to how, near their farm at Nome, ND, the small implement hit a rock in the field and jumped up throwing him forward and thereby underneath the sharp disc wheels. He had to crawl and limp home for attention to his wounds.
From the heat and the smoke generated by this monster a person working around it must have been miserable . I have read and heard stories of the maintenance required to keep one of these operating. I remember tilling fields when my tractor pulled through a not uncommon old bed of clinkers that had been cleaned out of the boiler in a past time.

This collection of old machines has been collected by some group who are interested in keeping some of the old history alive.

On the Edge

Yesterday, instead of fighting the huge crowd in Mandan for the 4th, we decided to drive down to the area where Mary was born and raised. She always gets a bit agitated when I tell her it is on the edge of civilization, in the sticks. I guess it's just my nature to tease, but after looking at the pictures I took it makes me wonder -


Where else can you find a scene like this at the mailbox?

Where else can you find it any handier to hop on a stagecoach?

Where else can you gather a tub full of rattlesnakes in half an hour?

Where else can you find a sister-in-law who likes to talk through the leaves? Now this is all a tongue-in-cheek observation. I wasn't born and raised down there so I really can't say. To be more accurate it really is a scenic area, and with the moisture received this year looks very green. My sister-in-law really didn't stay in the leaves for long but graciously invited us inside their home. But still, there are some things ...

Today, July 1, the start of the last half year, 2011. How the time flies; what is the line Merle Haggard sings: I'll be rolling downhill, like a snowball headed for hell. This weekend Mandan celebrates the 4th big - Art in the Park, parade, rodeo, etc. Like all holidays, the meaning of the 4th of July has become blurred, mostly lost to some. At the time it earned its significance though the folks who brought it about stuck their necks out a long ways. The men of the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence knew what it meant; it meant that their necks would stretch on a gallows if their attempt at independence from Great Britain failed.

One great way to learn and appreciate the struggles that the forefathers encountered is to read the book John Adams by David McCullough. Another great way would be to watch the DVD film John Adams, based on McCullough's book. I have that series in my library and have watched all or parts of it several times. A special treat was meeting the screenwriter of the film who was in attendance at the recent Western Writers of America convention in Bismarck. Much good writing comes from that organization's members, and I hope the material I am now working on will be seen as worthy.