Reorganizing

I needed to bring some order to the corner I call an office; my bookcases were a mess with no logical order to book arrangement. It was good to handle each book again, because whenever I do the ideas start flowing. So it was when I came to one written by Stephen Ambrose, his Band of Brothers. These “brothers” made up E Company, 506th Regiment, 101 Airborne, a company that fought in World War II from the invasion of Normandy all the way through the war to being the first soldiers to enter Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.

I’m not sure who hung the name on this company, but whoever it was found it in Act IV, Scene III of Shakespeare's "Henry V.” In it the title character prods his outnumbered British troops against the French at Agincourt in 1415: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/For he today that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother ... “

Our community history books inform me one member of this group, Myron Ranney, lived in Sheldon where his father, Russ Ranney, was editor/publisher of The Sheldon Progress. Of course, being born in 1942, I did not know him, but he was a friend and classmate with several people I did know well.

In one of my searches in the archives of The Progress, I copied a short piece that Russ wrote on August 20, 1942 about his son’s joining the army. “A letter came this morning from my son, Myron,  saying he has volunteered for the paratroop division of the army. Myron is 19 and a former student of the University of North Dakota. The letter brought a lump to my throat and made it hard for me to go to work. He was not forced to go. But he loves his country greater than his own security.”

Russ Ranney is at rest in the Sheldon cemetery where one restless afternoon I felt a yearning to drive with camera in hand to take some pictures. On his weathered gravemarker was inscribed the dates of his time on earth - February 23, 1892 to September 2, 1947. Obviously he lived long enough to see his son return from the war.

Myron participated successfully and of note in one small action Lt. Dick Winters ordered. Because the company’s parachute jump behind Utah Beach caused them to get widely scattered, Winters could find only thirteen of his men to attack and destroy German artillery pieces that were firing on the beach where American forces were landing. The enveloping maneuver that he ordered is said to be studied yet at West Point as an example of an assault on a fixed position. Without trying to explain the situation, it can be simply said that Ranney and one other man successfully attacked the German’s right flank and helped shut the large guns down. One source quotes Winters as saying that Ranney was one of “Easy Company’s killers who instinctively understood the intricacies of battle.”

So these thoughts are what happened when I reorganized my book collection. The Stephen Ambrose book Band of Brothers will live on, as will the books written by others in the company. Without the wartime experiences they’ve recorded, the stories surrounding residents named Ranney who once lived in my hometown would not have gained my attention to take a second look. Now I must get back to my duties reviewing books for the Western Writers of America. One has been on my desk for a few days.

What Are You Reading?

What is anybody reading nowadays? I’m mentioning one here that might interest some. “News of the World” by Paulette Jiles tells a story of a man in post-Civil War days who travels through Texas reading newspaper articles to audiences hungry for news. He is the one who informs them that the 15th Amendment grants African American men the right to vote. 

     Enter a ten-year-old white girl who’d been captured by Kiowa Indians six years previously and raised as one of their own but who bounty hunters have recaptured. The girl gets pawned off on the news reader who must tolerate three weeks with the girl as he fulfills his promise to return her home to her real parents. 

     Upon first opening the book I noticed she does not use quotation marks, much like Cormac McCarthy. One gets over that quirk easily and can continue reading a satisfying story. And I repeat the opening line - what is anybody reading nowadays?

Stuck in the Middle...

Seldom do I "copy and paste" anything, thinking that if it is worth posting it should come from my own finding or thinking. However, this picture struck me as being very funny and I just had to "copy and paste" it.

Visiting in a Civil Manner

I love this picture showing five Presidents visiting in a civil manner.

How the Time Flies

June 3 - Protest in Tiananmen Square crushed by Chinese military

On this day in 1989, the Chinese government called in the military to put down a pro-democracy demonstration staged by more than 100,000 people in Tiananmen Square in Beijing resulting in hundreds of deaths.

A Review of Stegner's Big Rock Candy Mountain

One of the great writers of the West wrote the novel THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN which I read many years ago. He was Wallace Stegner and the book is said to be semi-autobiographical. The "Bo" mentioned below was patterned after his father. A long article by A. O. Scott in today's New York Times (6-02-2020) named "Wallace Stegner and the Conflicted Soul of the West" bears some similarities to the virus we're experiencing. Here is a portion of that long article -

"One of the stories is that whiskey is an effective medicine, but the town is dry, so Bo, heedless of expert advice and by nature resistant to any attempt to tell him what to do, hatches a plan to cross the border into Montana and bring back a few cases. He undertakes a thrilling, harrowing journey, driving in a blizzard on dubious roads through locked-down villages and desolate farmsteads. It’s an exciting ride — a tour de force of precise, suspenseful prose — and also an appalling study in selfishness and irresponsibility. Chasing after a big score, Bo spreads the virus across a wide swath of territory before coming home and falling sick, along with Elsa and Bruce. Bo, a rambunctious avatar of the unconfined, can-do spirit of the West, is a mortal danger to everyone around him.

The picture of empty streets and stricken households — of neighbors reluctant to open their doors, of public buildings hastily converted into morgues and wards — makes for eerie reading now. So does the portrait of Bo Mason, a man who thinks he can outwit biology and who places money over family safety or civic obligation. “That quarantine’s nothing but a word,” he says, and he goes about his business with blustery confidence in his own immunity — to bad weather and financial miscalculation as well as infection. "

Sod Houses

We watched Tom Isern’s Plains Folk presentation last evening on Facebook. He sang an old folk song “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Plains,” and spoke of window wells so deep they could be sat in. My mother-in-law told stories of her youth living in a sodhouse and how she’d sit in the deep window well and watch for her parents to come back after milking the cows.

Isern and his wife Suzzanne are both NDSU professors who lend attention to the history of pioneer life on the Great Plains. Their show has appeared several times to date and can still be found archived on the Great Plains Facebook site. Given the comments they’ve received, it’s obvious it’s starting to catch on around the country.