These two lines open the book Not So Wild a Dream: “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.” They were penned by the once prominent writer and broadcaster, Eric Sevareid, one of North Dakota’s own. The town where the river curves around is Velva, North Dakota, the town of his boyhood.
If people in their 80s are permitted to have heroes, I will confess to Sevareid as one of mine. To read his beautiful writing or listen to his sonorous speaking voice confirms being in the presence of someone a cut above the ordinary in communication and thinking skills. Some years back I lucked out when finding Not So Wild a Dream at a garage sale and now regard it as being one of the best books in my collection.
To see the regard Sevareid holds in his home state, one only needs to walk through the state capitol building and find his portrait in The Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award Hall of Fame. In honor of his memory and accomplishments, he was the fifth inductee out of the present number of fifty honorees. The four chosen first were Lawrence Welk, Dorothy Stickney, Ivan Dmitri, and Roger Maris. It would have been hard to outdo with Welk or Maris in the line-up, but the other two came down to a matter of choice in my estimation.
While watching a video of him accepting one of many awards, he spoke to a matter that I wholeheartedly endorse. Basically, he said that if one cannot study to gain knowledge in a higher institution of learning, people can educate themselves by reading history. He said, “It’s all there, the repeated lessons of what helps and what harms.” When asked to talk to aspiring journalists, he tells them to read and read and read about the past if they’re going to write about the present with any serious meaning. So much of the present day’s entries to social media would never have been posted or would have been more sensible if only their authors had a stronger knowledge and/or understanding of history.
A Sevareid scholar, Raymond A. Schroth, wrote an informative biography of him titled The American Journey of Eric Sevareid and appeared at a program in the Heritage Center in Bismarck. We attended and bought his book, a book which has been very satisfying to read, second only to Not So Wild a Dream. For him Sevareid remained one on a short list of journalists whose thoughts and words really mattered. Those journalists either spoke his thoughts better than he himself could or made him rethink his own position.
Sevareid reminisced about times when asked where he was from and he would answer “North Dakota.” The questioners usually just nodded politely and changed the subject since they had no point of reference. They didn’t know anyone else from here so it prompted him to write that North Dakota stood as “a large rectangular blank spot in the nation’s mind.”
When he started out on his own, he rode freight trains and communed with hoboes he met along the way. He added a great deal to his experiences and knowledge when working as a reporter in Minneapolis covering the infamous truck drivers’ strike. Things went well for the strikers until the police set a trap one day which the truck drivers walked into. Fifty or more of them were shot with buckshot. His paper had reported the police were literally fighting for their lives, but when the tally appeared one policeman had been hurt, while nurses at the hospital said strikers had wounds in their backsides while they tried to run away. The scene deeply affected Sevareid and his future by saying, “Suddenly I knew, I understood deep in my bones and blood what Fascism was.”
He became a war reporter in World War II under the leadership of another great journalist, Edward R. Murrow. I remember him from his days as a commentator on CBS working with Walter Cronkite, where he became known and respected for his eloquent writing and verbal delivery. Then Sevareid’s advice to budding journalists to read and read and read history became a mantra frequently repeated by David McCullough whose estate just published his book: History Matters.
This book was edited by McCullough’s daughter and one of his close friends and brings together a collection of his work that they thought should be mentioned again. The first chapter asks Why History? He answers, “History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for. History is the bedrock of patriotism!
I had pestered the Barnes and Noble bookstore wondering when this book would come out, and just a few days ago it did. I wasn’t the only one waiting because when I asked a clerk about it, a man overheard the name McCullough and hurried over. He wanted one, too.
