Memories

“Teddy Roosevelt was the only president I ever liked.”   So said my father when he recalled a statement his father once said.  When I think about that statement I realize that a string of three memories had to come into play - Grandpa’s for comparing TR to other presidents, Dad’s for remembering what he’d said, and mine for recalling Dad’s statement.  This holds little significance for anyone except maybe a few family members.  In the absence of recorded history, they are what brings the past to light.

At one time books did not exist.  Nothing could be written down in the present for readers of the future; people had to rely on memory to pass stories on.  Some became so good at remembering stories passed down through the generations that when the printing process came along,  ancient material was printed from the long-line of memory. 

Were people’s memories better then?  No, they just trained themselves to remember.  Some of them used patterns or associations called a Memory Palace where they stored information in some orderly fashion. There is no reason we couldn’t memorize long books such as Homer’s The Odyssey or the Iliad. It just takes practice.  Personally, I never was good at memorizing. With such things as “The Village Blacksmith,” I would get about halfway through,  then pull some antics so the teacher would tell me to take my seat.  I could have used some how-to-do it hints from Homer.  Presently, there isn’t much demand for memorizers.  It’s much easier to look information up on the internet. 

We recently attended a large family gathering where pictures of old-time relatives circled around.  Pictures are always popular and receive a good share of attention.  Many of them had names written on their backsides which gave the viewers satisfaction in identifying  the subjects.  Unfortunately, some pictures did not have any names on them, and we were hard-pressed to figure out just who they might be.  Their identities will be forever unknown.  At least for purposes of the particular pictures, memory of them is lost.

A picture I have of an uncle on horseback where a deep snow background tells part of the story.  Simply explained roads were blocked at that time in 1947 and he had to ride those 10 or 12 miles to attend his father’s funeral.  A car sets there, too, stalled because it could go no further.  I always thought it was a Kaiser car, but my cousin Lance says, “No, it’s a Frazer.”  My memory recalls that whatever it was, it was a very nice car.

It so happened on the day President Trump recently landed Air Force One in Fargo to raise campaign funds, we drove to Kroll’s Diner for breakfast.  Beside our table hanging on the wall was a framed page from a magazine advertising 1947 Kaiser-Frazer cars.  The caption praised them, “You’ve admired their modern styling — the long, low road-hugging lines that have set a new vogue in automobile design.”

As an aside, this has little to do with memory, except that it was unusual.  In the cafe that morning sat six men dressed in black.  I didn’t think a lot about it until they got up to leave which made their belt-mounted pistols and badges evident.  Moments later, a group of four others walked in sporting the same gear.  How many security people accompany a president when they travel?  

It brought to mind of the time in Washington, DC when we stood in line waiting to enter the Washington Monument.  Plainly visible were men atop buildings holding rifles.  When I made it to the top and looked out towards the White House, I saw why the riflemen stood at the ready.  A flight of three helicopters flew by.  One of them dropped to land on the White House lawn and let off its passengers - George W. and Laura Bush.  Just another memory.

How many times have we overheard old-timers talking about “the old days” and the “dirty thirties,” the depression, the war, prohibition, or some hard winter.  Merle Haggard sang “In the good old days, when times were bad,” while Barbra Streisand’s song  remembers “the time I knew what happiness was.  Let the memory live again.”   

Artifacts Mark the Time

My dad enjoyed auction sales.  Maybe he had become addicted to the auctioneer’s chant calling buyers to bid on various artifacts.  Whenever Dad offered the highest bid, he would load the prizes into his battered old Ford pickup and head home.  The booty usually included old furniture, rusty tools, books, or boxes of miscellaneous items thrown together and sold as one lot.  

Today I’m looking at an item found in one of those boxes, something which has escaped the trash bucket, a tattered Stallion Service Account Book kept by a man named Richard Krueger of Sheldon.  We cannot tell how many stallions Mr. Krueger had standing at stud, but he filled the book with entries for the year’s business in 1927.  

An example entry shows C. R. Simon from Elliott who brought his six-year-old black mare named Dolly for breeding.  The fee Krueger charged him for the services of his stallion was $12.50, a price he charged each recorded customer.  Throughout the pages we find mares like a grey ten-year-old mare named Baldy, the brown eight-year-old Bess, the white ten-year-old Trixie, and more.  Horses bred for farm work were still important because rubber tired tractors weren’t prevalent.  A few years later in 1935 still only 14 percent of farm tractors rolled on pneumatic tires.

Nineteen twenty-seven was a momentous year for change.  A Model T Ford cost $360 and  ended production after manufacturing about 15 million of them starting in 1908.  Only 400,000 units were built in 1927 because the Model A which sold for $385 took its place in October.  I found another occurrence to be of interest in the auto industry - the first Volvo car rolled off the production line in Gothenburg, Sweden.  

We can name more important events of the year   Work began on Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota and ended 14 years later, 1941.  Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, decided whom the carvings would represent based on which presidents he thought represented the most important events in history.  The first transatlantic telephone call was made from New York City to London, and Charles Lindbergh flew his airplane named The Spirit of St. Louis from New York City to Paris in the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean.  

The New York Yankees fielded a great team in 1927, so great that they pulled off the first sweep of a National League team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, in the World Series.  The Yankee players earned the nickname “Murderer’s Row” which included Babe Ruth who hit his 60 homers in this year.

Movie-goers could attend the first movie with sound.  The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson featured six songs and 350 spoken words.

Returning to our horse theme, World War One ended a decade earlier where huge numbers of horses had been decimated.  During the horse-buying years of the war, a 1915 headline in a Virginia newspaper certainly must have horrified horse-lovers. It blared “Horses for Cannon Food and Bullet Meat.”  A North Dakota rancher with the well-known name Usher L. Burdick raised championship horses.  Maybe he had a premonition of the coming war because he urged ranchers to raise horses for profit and told them to start with the very best sires they could find locally; it did not matter much which breed they chose.  At a Grand Forks stock show in 1909 his horse named “Gazolite” placed as the champion in the three-year-old class.

Whether or not Richard Krueger raised championship studs is not known, but they were in demand.  He filled the pages of his journal with 50 customers whom he charged $12.50 for each of the mares brought to his stallion. To quote Dee Brown, “Sometimes there isn’t enough material.  There’s a story there and you can’t fill it in with facts, so you let your imagination run wild.”  That’s what we will have to do regarding this business enterprise because no other information is available.  With Krueger’s book filled and the last entry being July 13, he may have started a new book, but we don’t possess it.

In Remembrance

I recently read a line from a poem that seemed very appropriate to the occasion, the funeral of my father-in-law.  It simply stated, “And his life, like his furrows, ran straight and true.”  The sentiment was reinforced by someone my wife met at the after-service luncheon.  He, the son of an implement dealer told her of a conversation he’d overheard them having when he was just five years old.  Adam bought much of his farm machinery from this dealer, and the son remembered coming away with the impression that he was a good, honest man.  The boy grew up to take over the dealership, continued dealing with my father-in-law, and related to my wife that he’d never found a reason to change his mind.  What higher tribute can be said?

Another recent death, John McCain’s, is being remembered with high praise, too.  His life and independent spirit always impressed me.  When he received the nomination to run as the Republican candidate against Barack Obama for the presidency, I still believe I might have voted for him, but his sorry choice for a running mate made the decision for me. After all, the vice president is just a heart beat away.  McCain’s decency showed brightly the time a woman said to him she didn’t trust Obama.  “He’s an Arab.”  His response, “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man” will live long after him.

We’ve learned since his death that Senator McCain was a reading man who favored Ernest Hemingway, especially his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.  He said it was his favorite of all time.  “It instructed me to see the world as it is, with all its corruption and cruelty, and believe it’s worth fighting for anyway, even dying for.  No just cause is futile, even if it is lost, if it helps make the future better than the past.”

Many successful people have recognized the value of reading.  Abraham Lincoln would walk long distances to borrow a book, Warren Buffett reads 500 pages a day saying knowledge from reading builds up like compound interest, LeBron James reads many books and encourages his fellow teammates to do so,  Bill Gates thinks books are the best way to explore new topics, and Oprah Winfrey encourages reading through her book clubs.  

When I look at the sagging shelves in my own book cases, I see a lot of good books that I have read, even though I hate to admit there are many yet to read.  I can chalk up my neglect to tv, daydreaming, laziness, a whole assortment of other distractions, and a hungry stomach that forces me get up to find something to eat.

To list some of the good ones I have read, To Kill a Mockingbird hovers near the top of the list.  The main character and father figure Atticus Finch makes a statement much like the main character says in For Whom the Bell Tolls:  “Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”  

I especially liked two books which parallel each other in their theme of rugged independence, Elmer Kelton’s The Good Old Boys and Jack Schaefer’s Monte Walsh.  Both stories feature men who don’t want changes and cannot cope when they do occur.  Cars, roads, fences, and changing philosophies in the cattle industry need fewer men like them.

That takes me back to the lives of my father-in-law, my father, and others of their age.  They were born in the days when horses worked their fields and died in the digital age where computer use and development effects all aspects of life.  But at the end of their lives they didn’t have any idea how to turn on a computer.  To the other extreme, I recently observed a boy come into a newspaper museum who when spotting an old typewriter asked what is that?