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"AUNT JANE," LITTLE PHOEBE & 1880'S KANSAS
Monday
May 7, 2007
Today's Quotation:
"They don't hold themselves responsible for anything; that's the whole trouble with them!"
-- from THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON by Jane Smiley (1998; page 91).
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Dear Jay,
Hello again. And thanks for getting back to me. In the process of recommending Smiley's novel about Lidie Newton in 1850's "Bleeding Kansas," to you recently, I seem to have talked myself into re-reading it myself. Hence, the above quotation, one which carries almost universal applicability -- as I imagine you'd agree. As with McCullough's TRUMAN, each reading of Smiley's LIDIE NEWTON triggers a fresh stream of helpful memories.
While I understand perfectly well the value of tribal stories, oral tradition, cultural history, etc., my own experience while growing up was that neither the oldsters in my Green Family nor in my McCall Family had much of that sort of substance to offer either Kevin or me. Nevertheless, I was recently put in mind of one cloudy item of family lore which I suppose is worth preserving and passing along to your own daughter.
Let me take you back now to that afternoon in the mid-1960's when I was riding in the backseat of my parents' car (probably that big old '56 Packard) next to an aging Phoebe who was being treated to one last leisurely drive through the ghostscape of her girlhood, with particular focus on the Peoria, Kansas cemetery (where both her parents are evidently buried, along with [and I may have this all wrong] her sister Mozell [sp?] who died in her 20's, when Phoebe was a little girl in the 1880's). Because I never dreamed that things would turn out anything like they've turned out (assuming it's not still too early to apply the notion of things having "turned out" either this way or that . . . ), I neglected to take as careful notes on that distant afternoon as I would have otherwise. Never imagining that this day would ever arrive when I'd be quizzed over all that I saw and all that the oldsters said that afternoon, I let my mind wonder to such matters
as which girls I might have been able to date in the upcoming schoolyear.
Anyway, I remember that we were riding in that car together on that afternoon along an unpaved country road through a dense grove of trees which evidently had once surrounded a fairly extensive farmstead. And I remember that the minute we drew near to this haunted grove, Phoebe started talking to me about an old Negro woman whose only name she'd ever known was "Aunt Jane." This old woman was a former slave who took care of Phoebe and her younger siblings, May & Foster & Bess, when they were very small children on the Evans farm, back in the 1880's & 90's. (She may also have served as nanny to Lydia and other of Phoebe's siblings, whose names now escape me. We all know what the situation was back then with infant mortality, as well as with scarlet fever, typhoid, smallpox, influenza, etc.)
In point of fact, Phoebe didn't drag in any of this sociological garbage that I've just subjected you to, when she talked to me that afternoon about the kindly former slave woman she'd known only as "Aunt Jane." I suspect that she had very little conscious memory of her. And yet, I can't help imagining that it was Aunt Jane who kindled in Phoebe that spirit of inclusiveness she handed down to us.
BUT I COULD BE WRONG,
Galen
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Saturday, June 7, 2008
Galen & Ginsberg in Wichita (circa 1966)
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Subject: GALEN & GINSBERG IN WICHITA; circa 1966; II
Thursday
November 30, 2006
(Before the Blizzard)
Dear Magda & Jaromir,
Now that you've had the opportunity to read a few lines of Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra," please allow me to share with you the short version of how I'm most directly connected with that poem.
Before I do so, however, I wanted to mention a very well-known and generally highly-regarded American novel from the 1920's. It' entitled BABBIT and was written by Sinclair Lewis. With regard to all that Jaromir and I have talked about over the past few weeks, it occurred to me the other day that Lewis's BABBIT may well be the one single book which most compactly contains my own vision of what's wrong with life today in Johnson County, Kansas. I understand that you're both as busy as I am nowadays, but I happen to know for a fact that BABBIT is available on both cassette and CD, in case you have time to listen to it in your car or home sometime. If, by chance, you're already thoroughly familiar with it, perhaps we could chat about it in the near future and discuss its critical bearing on our mutual discontents with our mutual culture, both global and local.
What I'd started to say before remembering that I'd meant to mention BABBIT to you (especially Jaromir) was that Allen Ginsberg's longish hallucinatory post-Beat poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra" holds a rather special place in my heart. There are several reasons for this. One obvious reason is that it was evidently composed in and around and is therefore inevitably highly referential to Wichita, Kansas, the small city where I grew up and went to school.
A more personal reason, however, is that I actually had the privilege of coming into a kind of distant contact with Ginsberg when he was visiting Wichita in 1966, back when I was a junior at East High School there. How this came about was that my adoptive mother Margaret mentioned to me at the supper table one evening that she'd read in the paper that Ginsberg had recently given several performances of his (by 1966 Wichita [a la Babbit] standards) outrageous poetry at a place called The Skidrow Beanery, a rundown old 19-teenzish vacant retail space in one of the older sections of downtown Wichita, just west of the train station. At the time, I happened to be dating an unusually moxy, adventuresome, bohemian kindred spirit my age named Pam Batchelor, who was probably the only girl in a high school of 3,000 students who'd have had the spunk and grit and curiosity to let me take her to this mysterious, decadent Skidrow Beanery one evening, in search
of the legendary Allen Ginsberg.
The short version is that someone else was reading instead that evening; but Ginsberg was present, lurking in the shadows, behind one of those beaded-string curtains that were to become so modish a few years later. There he was, the living legend himself, bearded and younger than I am today, swaying silently in a shadowy haze of incense to the wildly homoerotic post-Beat-style hallucinatory rantings of a Ginsberg wanna-be who called himself something like Dallas Townsend, and who, decades later, lived across a rundown 20's-Hollywood-style 4-plex courtyard from me on South Old Manor Road and was thrilled to death to learn through casual conversation that, as a curious Ginsberg-worshipping teenager, I'd heard him read his poetry that evening in 1966 at the Skidrow Beanery.
It wasn't until 1973 that I finally got to meet Ginsberg in person and to hear him perform, when I was a grad student at the University of Utah.
To Be Continued,
Galen
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Subject: GALEN & GINSBERG IN WICHITA; circa 1966; II
Thursday
November 30, 2006
(Before the Blizzard)
Dear Magda & Jaromir,
Now that you've had the opportunity to read a few lines of Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra," please allow me to share with you the short version of how I'm most directly connected with that poem.
Before I do so, however, I wanted to mention a very well-known and generally highly-regarded American novel from the 1920's. It' entitled BABBIT and was written by Sinclair Lewis. With regard to all that Jaromir and I have talked about over the past few weeks, it occurred to me the other day that Lewis's BABBIT may well be the one single book which most compactly contains my own vision of what's wrong with life today in Johnson County, Kansas. I understand that you're both as busy as I am nowadays, but I happen to know for a fact that BABBIT is available on both cassette and CD, in case you have time to listen to it in your car or home sometime. If, by chance, you're already thoroughly familiar with it, perhaps we could chat about it in the near future and discuss its critical bearing on our mutual discontents with our mutual culture, both global and local.
What I'd started to say before remembering that I'd meant to mention BABBIT to you (especially Jaromir) was that Allen Ginsberg's longish hallucinatory post-Beat poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra" holds a rather special place in my heart. There are several reasons for this. One obvious reason is that it was evidently composed in and around and is therefore inevitably highly referential to Wichita, Kansas, the small city where I grew up and went to school.
A more personal reason, however, is that I actually had the privilege of coming into a kind of distant contact with Ginsberg when he was visiting Wichita in 1966, back when I was a junior at East High School there. How this came about was that my adoptive mother Margaret mentioned to me at the supper table one evening that she'd read in the paper that Ginsberg had recently given several performances of his (by 1966 Wichita [a la Babbit] standards) outrageous poetry at a place called The Skidrow Beanery, a rundown old 19-teenzish vacant retail space in one of the older sections of downtown Wichita, just west of the train station. At the time, I happened to be dating an unusually moxy, adventuresome, bohemian kindred spirit my age named Pam Batchelor, who was probably the only girl in a high school of 3,000 students who'd have had the spunk and grit and curiosity to let me take her to this mysterious, decadent Skidrow Beanery one evening, in search
of the legendary Allen Ginsberg.
The short version is that someone else was reading instead that evening; but Ginsberg was present, lurking in the shadows, behind one of those beaded-string curtains that were to become so modish a few years later. There he was, the living legend himself, bearded and younger than I am today, swaying silently in a shadowy haze of incense to the wildly homoerotic post-Beat-style hallucinatory rantings of a Ginsberg wanna-be who called himself something like Dallas Townsend, and who, decades later, lived across a rundown 20's-Hollywood-style 4-plex courtyard from me on South Old Manor Road and was thrilled to death to learn through casual conversation that, as a curious Ginsberg-worshipping teenager, I'd heard him read his poetry that evening in 1966 at the Skidrow Beanery.
It wasn't until 1973 that I finally got to meet Ginsberg in person and to hear him perform, when I was a grad student at the University of Utah.
To Be Continued,
Galen
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Friday, June 6, 2008
"After-Image" by Galen Green (c. 1986)
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AFTER-IMAGE
1.
This year’s been one in which I’ve thought of you and other friends, and wondered
How we do these passive panic dances, these old and new modes of alienation from
The light of who we are and...how we become the tree of our knowledge of what we
Want each other to see, when I think about you and you about me.
Watching a candle, I think again tonight of you and me and us and where we’d be,
If not for our brief sharing of those bright moments long ago on our way to these
True and separate moments here and now. I agree that sentimentality is hardly
Ever the right emotion. Yet, when I think of how we outgrew the past and each
Other, I close my eyes on the white after-image of memory, distant, tight.
2.
The clock on the wall tells me where to go, into the future in the only machine
I know. This jar of cider is all I have to show for the thousands of minutes I’ve
Dragged my fleshy freight from my mother’s feet where I used to play to my mother’s
Feet, which have followed me all the way to here and now. My breath just wants to
Say that it has enjoyed hosting my wonderful weight.
Watching this candle tonight, I cannot delay a moment longer in swallowing the bait
Of your face in my memory which from below consciousness swallows me. And here
I’ll stay from now until it all becomes too late to think anymore and it’s time to
Stop and grow into next year and tomorrow and time to wait and...time to sit and
Contemplate the gray.
3.
This year’s been one in which I’ve sat on the lawn and thought of you and other
Friends who’ve gone into the touchless past. Tonight, I yawn with joy and think
Of you...and prop my feet on an empty crate and rub my weary eyes and sip this
Jar of cider and the lies I tell myself as this once-bright candle dies.
The clock in my memory tells me not to treat these thoughts of you too rough,
Lest they rise and body forth into this air like the sweet reality of the you
I knew at the dawn of my days on earth: your shoulders, breasts and thighs
Composed by the gods of love, perfect, neat. This year’s been one in which I’ve
Played the pawn to the white queen of your memory, sketched on a sheet of blank
After-image, this empty street.
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986
.
AFTER-IMAGE
1.
This year’s been one in which I’ve thought of you and other friends, and wondered
How we do these passive panic dances, these old and new modes of alienation from
The light of who we are and...how we become the tree of our knowledge of what we
Want each other to see, when I think about you and you about me.
Watching a candle, I think again tonight of you and me and us and where we’d be,
If not for our brief sharing of those bright moments long ago on our way to these
True and separate moments here and now. I agree that sentimentality is hardly
Ever the right emotion. Yet, when I think of how we outgrew the past and each
Other, I close my eyes on the white after-image of memory, distant, tight.
2.
The clock on the wall tells me where to go, into the future in the only machine
I know. This jar of cider is all I have to show for the thousands of minutes I’ve
Dragged my fleshy freight from my mother’s feet where I used to play to my mother’s
Feet, which have followed me all the way to here and now. My breath just wants to
Say that it has enjoyed hosting my wonderful weight.
Watching this candle tonight, I cannot delay a moment longer in swallowing the bait
Of your face in my memory which from below consciousness swallows me. And here
I’ll stay from now until it all becomes too late to think anymore and it’s time to
Stop and grow into next year and tomorrow and time to wait and...time to sit and
Contemplate the gray.
3.
This year’s been one in which I’ve sat on the lawn and thought of you and other
Friends who’ve gone into the touchless past. Tonight, I yawn with joy and think
Of you...and prop my feet on an empty crate and rub my weary eyes and sip this
Jar of cider and the lies I tell myself as this once-bright candle dies.
The clock in my memory tells me not to treat these thoughts of you too rough,
Lest they rise and body forth into this air like the sweet reality of the you
I knew at the dawn of my days on earth: your shoulders, breasts and thighs
Composed by the gods of love, perfect, neat. This year’s been one in which I’ve
Played the pawn to the white queen of your memory, sketched on a sheet of blank
After-image, this empty street.
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986
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Sunday, June 1, 2008
Obit. of Everybody's Favorite Uncle (10/24/98)
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CECIL McCALL
APRIL 23, 1910 - OCTOBER 24, 1998
OBITUARY FROM THE KANSAS CITY STAR *** Cecil Eugene McCall, Kansas City, Missouri passed away October 24, 1998 at his home. Funeral services will be at 10 am, Wednesday, October 28 at Epworth-Roanoke United Methodist Church, Kansas City, Missouri; burial will be at 2:00 pm Wednesday at Richmond Cemetery, Richmond, Kansas. Parking for the church will be available on Wednesday at 42nd & Genessee. Friends may call 6:30-8:00 pm Tuesday, October 27 at McGilley Midtown Chapel, Kansas City, Missouri. In lieu of flowers, please make contributions to the Kansas City Hospice or to the church. Cecil was born in Wellsville, Kansas on April 23, 1910 to William Keeling & Phoebe Evans McCall. He married Elsie Irene Atwood in 1934. He resided in Richmond, Kansas, where he served on the city council and school board. He then moved to Kansas City where he worked for Dealers Transport Company until retiring in 1971. After retiring, he worked as a desk clerk at the Mission Inn Motel, Mission, Kansas until 1988. He had been a member of Epworth-Roanoke United Methodist Church since 1950. He was also a member of the local Teamsters Retirees Club, served as a Boy Scouts of America leader for several years, and was an honorary warrior in the Tribe of Mic-o-Say. He also served for several years on the board of the Westwood Homes Association, Kansas City, Missouri. He was preceeded in death by his parents, a brother, William Raymond McCall and a sister, Margaret McCall Green. He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Elsie; a brother, Myron E. McCall of Ottawa, Kansas; daughters, Frances Irene Kimball, of the home; Cecilia Lucille Van Velzen and her husband, Bill, of Independence, Missouri; Linette Lee Marcotte and her husband, Allan of Kansas City, Missouri; a son, William Eugene McCall and his wife Betty Lou of Pleasant Hill, Missouri; 13 grandchildren; 17 great-grandchildren and 1 great-great-grandson and many other family members and friends. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ THE FAMILY GATHERS *** Upon word of his death, family members from as far away as Japan, California, Michigan, Texas, New York, Atlanta and Virginia made their way to Kansas City. As it has been for many decades, the McCall house is considered by most to be the family home. It has always been the place where family could just drop by unannounced, plop down, make themselves at home, enjoy a meal, or even stay for days at a time. This week would be no different. So many family members arrived by Monday, that even though the house has five bedrooms, mats had to be placed in one room for a bunch of kids to bed down for the night. Although there were periodic bouts of crying, the mood was mostly upbeat. Everyone talked and laughed about their favorite "grandpa" stories. Kids, whose names could be remembered by few other than Grandma herself ran amok around the house. Friends dropped by to call, the phone rang often. When visitors would attempt to console Grandma, she would say, "I'm fine, I've got my family". ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________- VERY SPECIAL MENTION *** Thanks to Allan Marcotte for an especially moving tribute in his eulogy at the church on Wednesday morning. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ If you would like to contribute your own tribute or story about Cecil McCall, please send it to: jay.sarajevo@excite.com
· Personal Web Pages @ att.net!
Please feel free to contact me at the following address:
Accesses:
.
CECIL McCALL
APRIL 23, 1910 - OCTOBER 24, 1998
OBITUARY FROM THE KANSAS CITY STAR *** Cecil Eugene McCall, Kansas City, Missouri passed away October 24, 1998 at his home. Funeral services will be at 10 am, Wednesday, October 28 at Epworth-Roanoke United Methodist Church, Kansas City, Missouri; burial will be at 2:00 pm Wednesday at Richmond Cemetery, Richmond, Kansas. Parking for the church will be available on Wednesday at 42nd & Genessee. Friends may call 6:30-8:00 pm Tuesday, October 27 at McGilley Midtown Chapel, Kansas City, Missouri. In lieu of flowers, please make contributions to the Kansas City Hospice or to the church. Cecil was born in Wellsville, Kansas on April 23, 1910 to William Keeling & Phoebe Evans McCall. He married Elsie Irene Atwood in 1934. He resided in Richmond, Kansas, where he served on the city council and school board. He then moved to Kansas City where he worked for Dealers Transport Company until retiring in 1971. After retiring, he worked as a desk clerk at the Mission Inn Motel, Mission, Kansas until 1988. He had been a member of Epworth-Roanoke United Methodist Church since 1950. He was also a member of the local Teamsters Retirees Club, served as a Boy Scouts of America leader for several years, and was an honorary warrior in the Tribe of Mic-o-Say. He also served for several years on the board of the Westwood Homes Association, Kansas City, Missouri. He was preceeded in death by his parents, a brother, William Raymond McCall and a sister, Margaret McCall Green. He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Elsie; a brother, Myron E. McCall of Ottawa, Kansas; daughters, Frances Irene Kimball, of the home; Cecilia Lucille Van Velzen and her husband, Bill, of Independence, Missouri; Linette Lee Marcotte and her husband, Allan of Kansas City, Missouri; a son, William Eugene McCall and his wife Betty Lou of Pleasant Hill, Missouri; 13 grandchildren; 17 great-grandchildren and 1 great-great-grandson and many other family members and friends. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ THE FAMILY GATHERS *** Upon word of his death, family members from as far away as Japan, California, Michigan, Texas, New York, Atlanta and Virginia made their way to Kansas City. As it has been for many decades, the McCall house is considered by most to be the family home. It has always been the place where family could just drop by unannounced, plop down, make themselves at home, enjoy a meal, or even stay for days at a time. This week would be no different. So many family members arrived by Monday, that even though the house has five bedrooms, mats had to be placed in one room for a bunch of kids to bed down for the night. Although there were periodic bouts of crying, the mood was mostly upbeat. Everyone talked and laughed about their favorite "grandpa" stories. Kids, whose names could be remembered by few other than Grandma herself ran amok around the house. Friends dropped by to call, the phone rang often. When visitors would attempt to console Grandma, she would say, "I'm fine, I've got my family". ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________- VERY SPECIAL MENTION *** Thanks to Allan Marcotte for an especially moving tribute in his eulogy at the church on Wednesday morning. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ If you would like to contribute your own tribute or story about Cecil McCall, please send it to: jay.sarajevo@excite.com
· Personal Web Pages @ att.net!
Please feel free to contact me at the following address:
Accesses:
.
Obit. for Galen's Main Mentor
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F. William "Bill" Nelson
Nelson, F. William (Bill), 83, died on October 9, 2005. Private services have been held. Bill was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 19, 1922. His family moved to Wichita, where he graduated from Wichita East in 1939. After receiving a B.A. from the University of Texas, he served as an officer in the Navy during World War II. When the war ended, he completed a Masters degree at Columbia University and a PhD from the University of Oklahoma. He returned to Wichita in 1947 to teach at W.S.U., where he remained until retirement in 1988. During his years at Wichita State, he served as chair of the English department and was elected president of the faculty senate. He founded the Wichita Film Society, and was co-founder and the first director of the Honors Program at W.S.U. He is survived by his wife Susan, his children James (Sandra) Nelson of Wichita, William (Laurel) Nelson of Redlands, CA, Antonya (Robert Boswell) Nelson of Las Cruces, NM, David (Myranda) Nelson of Salt Lake City, UT, and Juliet (Chris Greene) Nelson of Lawrence, KS, and ten grandchildren. Services by Broadway Mortuary.
Published in the Wichita Eagle on 10/10/2005.
for picture see :
http://www.legacy.com/kansas/LegacySubPage2.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=15358963
F. William "Bill" Nelson
Nelson, F. William (Bill), 83, died on October 9, 2005. Private services have been held. Bill was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 19, 1922. His family moved to Wichita, where he graduated from Wichita East in 1939. After receiving a B.A. from the University of Texas, he served as an officer in the Navy during World War II. When the war ended, he completed a Masters degree at Columbia University and a PhD from the University of Oklahoma. He returned to Wichita in 1947 to teach at W.S.U., where he remained until retirement in 1988. During his years at Wichita State, he served as chair of the English department and was elected president of the faculty senate. He founded the Wichita Film Society, and was co-founder and the first director of the Honors Program at W.S.U. He is survived by his wife Susan, his children James (Sandra) Nelson of Wichita, William (Laurel) Nelson of Redlands, CA, Antonya (Robert Boswell) Nelson of Las Cruces, NM, David (Myranda) Nelson of Salt Lake City, UT, and Juliet (Chris Greene) Nelson of Lawrence, KS, and ten grandchildren. Services by Broadway Mortuary.
Published in the Wichita Eagle on 10/10/2005.
for picture see :
http://www.legacy.com/kansas/LegacySubPage2.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=15358963
Saturday, May 31, 2008
When I Close My Eyes, I Can See . . . .
Galen Green
msmth2210@aol.com
mythoklast@mailstation.com
(816) 807-4957 (voice mail)
Wednesday
November 7, 2007
(the late Marie Curie's
140th birthday)
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When I Close My Eyes, I Can See . . . . .
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"I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed -- personally and intimately -- to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago."
-- Stephen Greenblatt (author of Will in the World [2004] and founder of the school of literary criticism called New Historicism, which is the idea that the only way to really understand a work of art is to examine everything that was going on in the world of the artist at the time the work of art was created.)
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Dear Shannon (& Co.),
When I close my eyes, I can see our old neighborhood, nestled there in what was then the northeast corner of Wichita, Kansas, there in the middle of the so-called "Cold War," there on that gentle, almost imperceptible slope, downward from its crest along Gentry Drive where your family lived, across Fairmount Park where so much of our becoming took place, across the aptly named Hillside to North Lorraine where Margaret & Harry & Lois & Kevin & I lived in our dinky gray hovel, and where that lovely antique fortress of a red brick schoolhouse named "Fairmount" rose up to mold to its will the wet clay for our fresh little heathen selves, and on downward, ever so gradually toward the west to those rickety neighborhoods where Wichita's African-American families found themselves ghettoized back then, and on across the haunted rail yards, the tall white grain elevators, the mysterious, fragrant, glowing petroleum refinery, the pungent, mooing cattle pens, and on across Broadway (Highway 81), on down to the muddy banks of the Arkansas River, which connected us even then in my boyish imagination to the mighty Mississippi and thus to the vast and mighty oceans of the whole wide world.
Remember the swimming pool at Fairmount Park where so many of us kids in the 1950’s first learned to hold our breath and float and kick! kick! kick! and cup our little hands to propel our little bodies forward, and then bake in the midday summer sun on the concrete banks before jumping back into that icy water?
When I close my eyes, I can see that Fairmount Park shelter house on a sweltering summer's afternoon, with all its windows open wide and all its fans turned up on "high," as we kids stand around in a circle where the day-camp counselor is leading us in a rousing chorus of: "Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow?" -- etc. . . and I can somewhat see the supposedly Native American style "comb holder" I made for my father out of brightly colored plastic “bison sinews” and strips of extremely low-grade pre-cut little rectangles of rawhide, there in the day-camp crafts program, artfully crafted to keep our dutiful mothers relatively sane. (In the case of my adoptive mother Margaret, this formula proved only partially effective. But that's another story for another day.)
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Remember the skies above Wichita in the 1950's & '60's -- how they were forever buzzing, humming, roaring with aircraft of every size, shape and description? Being of the male persuasion, naturally what impressed me most were the Air Force jets; and of those, the huge, silver, lumbering B-47's and B-52's which I knew my daddy had helped to build "out at the plant," which was his name for the sprawling Boeing Aircraft facility adjacent to McConnell Air Force Base, way off in the southeast corner of the city, where Harry worked as a toolmaker from the summer before Pearl Harbor until sometime during my freshman year at Wichita State.
As has already been noted, our childhood -- yours and mine -- overlapped the middle part of the so-called "Cold War" -- the height of the Cold War, as historians and journalists now refer to it. But, besides these ubiquitous military jets, the skies above Wichita seemed to be ceaselessly humming, sputtering, whining, whirring, moaning . . . with the engines of other airplanes, put together by other daddies who worked at factories with names like Beech and Cessna. Wichita, back then, had been dubbed "The Air Capital of the World," so that I suppose any child of either gender would have found the never-ending air show high above our heads a source of constant distraction, if not exactly entertainment.
When I close my eyes, I can see the sidewalk where I walked to school five mornings a week, strewn with what, back then, we called "IBM punch cards" (because we were aware of only one computer company and naively believed them to do only one thing, which was to process by the billions these mysterious punch cards, approximately the size and shape of a Series E United States Savings Bond, with the encoded data of each card rendered as a series of tiny rectangular perforations approximately the size and shape of those notorious Florida "chads" which played such an historically memorable role in the 2000 Presidential (Gore v. Bush) counter-election. Never having actually touched a computer punch card before, I found them utterly fascinating and began picking up as many as I could carry, until my fascination wore thin.
As it turned out (And please correct me if I'm wrong about this.), the scatter of techno-litter I can still see today, when I close my eyes, was reportedly part of some Top Secret Cold War military experiment. That's all anyone ever made known to me; and even that may have been totally bogus. As I recall, we good citizens of Wichita were asked to turn in any of these cards that we found. I don't remember if we were to leave them in our mailboxes for our letter carrier or take them to school and give them to our teacher. It was all extremely vague to me, at the age of 6 or 7. Does any of this ring a bell? My hindsighted guess is that it may have had something to do with wind-drift patterns and potential threats of chemical terrorism -- or that the megalomaniacal paranoids in the military community just wanted to see if we'd actually do what they told us to do.
But while we're in that "neighborhood": Do you remember those metal dog tags we all wore on chains around our necks for several years in the mid-1950's? Was that a nationwide project or merely local? I recall having it emphasized to me on innumerable occasions that, because of the presence of McConnell AFB and of Boeing Aircraft and of the ICBM silos in the immediate vicinity, our fair city was considered to be a prime military target, in the event (Heavens forefend!) that World War III were to break out. Therefore, when Miss Robertson (or Mrs. James or whomever) told our class that the dog tags were to help the police find us if we got lost (the way I did, when trying to find my way back home after walking you home one afternoon) . . . when the teacher fed us that line, the only image which came to my geopolitically focused young mind was of all our hopeful little bodies burnt to a crisp in a thermonuclear attack launched by the Soviet Union, with nothing but our blacked little skeletons and those nifty metal dog tags remaining. But, given my father's vividly vocal obsession with biblical apocalypse, this image was, for me, even at the age of 7, neither new nor especially horrifying.
%%%%%%%
But enough (for the time being) about the Cold War component to our childhood in Wichita. Let me close my weary old Irish turtle eyes once again and see what else I can see this time. Ah, yes! There's a more pleasant image! Remember the Pied Piper Bookstore? Of course you do! A couple of doors south of the broadcasting studio of the university's radio station, KMUW, just off 17th Street on Fairmount. No brief description of the Pied Piper could possibly do it justice. It was, of course, "housed" literally in what had been someone's tiny wood-frame house, which actually had, if I recall correctly, a basement, though I don't recall ever being allowed to go down there. The Pied Piper was, of course, on the surface of it, just another used bookstore, a vanishing breed here in 21st century America. But to a hungry-minded little boy growing up in a fairly dull Midwestern city during the Eisenhower years, it was a feast of curiosities and of satisfactions for my curiosities.
When I close my eyes, I can see the inside of the Pied Piper Bookstore as it appeared to me that very first time Steve Sowards (who else!) took me there for my initiatory tour and to introduce me to the owner/proprietor, Jack Whitesell, and his dozen or so cats who lounged around amidst the dusty old books and periodicals or sunned themselves in the windows or nursed a new litter of kittens in the some dark corner, clear at the back of the store, between the moldering boxes of ancient National Geographics and Pre-World War II Life Magazines. Steve & I would have been in the 4th or 5th grade at Fairmount Elementary at the time.
Just in case you never had the pleasure of hanging out for an hour or two in the Pied Piper (way back before Jack finally managed to smoke himself to death sometime in the late 1970's and the store was closed down) I'll describe it for you simply as a very loosely organized jumble of relatively low-quality books and magazines which nobody much wanted but which Jack's loyal customer base of several hundred of us would buy from, every now and then, as much for the sake of pity and/or solidarity as anything. Beneath its tobacco-smoke- cat-urine- moldy-paper- -wreaking surface, the Pied Piper was, at heart, about its spirit and atmosphere, more than about any given element of its molecular reality. I suspect that it stood for an imaginary bohemian zeitgeist which its most loyal patrons (Galen Green foremost among them, from 1959 till 1976 or so) longed to inhabit as a temporary escape from Wichita's more dominant zeitgeists such as the aforementioned bastions of America's military-industrial complex or "Cowtown" or that so-called "amusement park" ironically named "Joyland."
%%%%%%%
To be continued . . .
Galen
November 12, 2007
%%%%%%%
P.S.
Hello Shannon -
Received your very welcome note this morning, just as I was about to send this fifth installment off to you (& yours). Will make every effort to respond in my sixth installment to your most recent thoughts. Thanks so much for taking the time to connect. And thanks again for being exactly the “audience” I need to impel me to write down these reminiscences which I should have recorded long ago. Please feel free to share them with Chris, Steve, etc; as I’m sure you can tell they are, ultimately, intended for a more general audience. Incidentally: from Nov. 16th thru the 26th, my personal schedule will be a bit crazy, so please e-mail anything during that period to both the e-mail addresses at the top of this installment. (Thanks!) Meanwhile, here are the words to a song I wrote back in 1986, in that cemetery on what used to be the northeast corner of Hillside & Kellogg, before they “improved” it. It was near the house at 621 S. Lorraine, which we moved to in the summer of 1965. The song itself could be said, I suppose, to be about a far more general overview of that thing called “the old neighborhood.” Wichita is a stranger to me now. We haven’t been back there since 2002; and before that, not since I moved here after Margaret’s death in 1990 - except for an hour or two when driving through. Do you still have ties there?
Will write more soon, God willing. Enjoy the song. Let me know how you’re doing? Until next time, stay well.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Galen
%%%%%%%
IN THE CEMETERY ABOVE THE INTERSTATE
As I walk amidst the human debris of my city,
These gravestones fail to dazzle my blood.
But a sharp wind from Milwaukee does,
And so I choose to muzzle
Myself with my collar turned up, still I wince,
As I squint out over these labels I am.
December’s bright wind grows intense.
Upon my face, here among the damned.
Once, lost tribes walked in frazzle of genocide,
Here, where immense engines rise and fall and sizzle
Their songs to sing our circumstance.
The far horizon, like a clam of earth and sky,
Seals around the sticky slime of life.
I look out at them, these driven dead,
Hell-bent for nooky.
My tearing eyes take in each ounce of landscape,
Here where the worn-out lacky
That was my father makes perfect sense,
Inside this earth, this fortune cookie.
These pickled corpses cannot guzzle
Another drop of wind or whim,
For they have felt the final fizzle
Snuff out their fuses, sans “BLAM!”
These granite markers, cold and numb,
Endure this wind, this flow, this rinse
Of human madness and the slam
Of storm and war and arrogance.
I wish I had a cup of saki
To warm my hands and light my nozzle.
For this is the weather for playing hockey
To the tune of winter’s icy chisel.
A pine tree sways like a furry lance.
The yellow grass is a sea of bristles.
Far off, the city hums, and hence,
I think of you. This brief epistle
I share with you like a Christmas ham
Is meant to bring you peace when we
Are far apart in Vietnam
Or any hell from which we might wish to be set free.
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986
Performed on Peasant Cantata c 2003
Excerpted here from The Toolmaker’s Other Son
(rough draft copyright 2005 by Galen Green)
msmth2210@aol.com
mythoklast@mailstation.com
(816) 807-4957 (voice mail)
Wednesday
November 7, 2007
(the late Marie Curie's
140th birthday)
%%%%%%%
When I Close My Eyes, I Can See . . . . .
%%%%%%%
"I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed -- personally and intimately -- to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago."
-- Stephen Greenblatt (author of Will in the World [2004] and founder of the school of literary criticism called New Historicism, which is the idea that the only way to really understand a work of art is to examine everything that was going on in the world of the artist at the time the work of art was created.)
%%%%%%%
Dear Shannon (& Co.),
When I close my eyes, I can see our old neighborhood, nestled there in what was then the northeast corner of Wichita, Kansas, there in the middle of the so-called "Cold War," there on that gentle, almost imperceptible slope, downward from its crest along Gentry Drive where your family lived, across Fairmount Park where so much of our becoming took place, across the aptly named Hillside to North Lorraine where Margaret & Harry & Lois & Kevin & I lived in our dinky gray hovel, and where that lovely antique fortress of a red brick schoolhouse named "Fairmount" rose up to mold to its will the wet clay for our fresh little heathen selves, and on downward, ever so gradually toward the west to those rickety neighborhoods where Wichita's African-American families found themselves ghettoized back then, and on across the haunted rail yards, the tall white grain elevators, the mysterious, fragrant, glowing petroleum refinery, the pungent, mooing cattle pens, and on across Broadway (Highway 81), on down to the muddy banks of the Arkansas River, which connected us even then in my boyish imagination to the mighty Mississippi and thus to the vast and mighty oceans of the whole wide world.
Remember the swimming pool at Fairmount Park where so many of us kids in the 1950’s first learned to hold our breath and float and kick! kick! kick! and cup our little hands to propel our little bodies forward, and then bake in the midday summer sun on the concrete banks before jumping back into that icy water?
When I close my eyes, I can see that Fairmount Park shelter house on a sweltering summer's afternoon, with all its windows open wide and all its fans turned up on "high," as we kids stand around in a circle where the day-camp counselor is leading us in a rousing chorus of: "Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow?" -- etc. . . and I can somewhat see the supposedly Native American style "comb holder" I made for my father out of brightly colored plastic “bison sinews” and strips of extremely low-grade pre-cut little rectangles of rawhide, there in the day-camp crafts program, artfully crafted to keep our dutiful mothers relatively sane. (In the case of my adoptive mother Margaret, this formula proved only partially effective. But that's another story for another day.)
%%%%%%%
Remember the skies above Wichita in the 1950's & '60's -- how they were forever buzzing, humming, roaring with aircraft of every size, shape and description? Being of the male persuasion, naturally what impressed me most were the Air Force jets; and of those, the huge, silver, lumbering B-47's and B-52's which I knew my daddy had helped to build "out at the plant," which was his name for the sprawling Boeing Aircraft facility adjacent to McConnell Air Force Base, way off in the southeast corner of the city, where Harry worked as a toolmaker from the summer before Pearl Harbor until sometime during my freshman year at Wichita State.
As has already been noted, our childhood -- yours and mine -- overlapped the middle part of the so-called "Cold War" -- the height of the Cold War, as historians and journalists now refer to it. But, besides these ubiquitous military jets, the skies above Wichita seemed to be ceaselessly humming, sputtering, whining, whirring, moaning . . . with the engines of other airplanes, put together by other daddies who worked at factories with names like Beech and Cessna. Wichita, back then, had been dubbed "The Air Capital of the World," so that I suppose any child of either gender would have found the never-ending air show high above our heads a source of constant distraction, if not exactly entertainment.
When I close my eyes, I can see the sidewalk where I walked to school five mornings a week, strewn with what, back then, we called "IBM punch cards" (because we were aware of only one computer company and naively believed them to do only one thing, which was to process by the billions these mysterious punch cards, approximately the size and shape of a Series E United States Savings Bond, with the encoded data of each card rendered as a series of tiny rectangular perforations approximately the size and shape of those notorious Florida "chads" which played such an historically memorable role in the 2000 Presidential (Gore v. Bush) counter-election. Never having actually touched a computer punch card before, I found them utterly fascinating and began picking up as many as I could carry, until my fascination wore thin.
As it turned out (And please correct me if I'm wrong about this.), the scatter of techno-litter I can still see today, when I close my eyes, was reportedly part of some Top Secret Cold War military experiment. That's all anyone ever made known to me; and even that may have been totally bogus. As I recall, we good citizens of Wichita were asked to turn in any of these cards that we found. I don't remember if we were to leave them in our mailboxes for our letter carrier or take them to school and give them to our teacher. It was all extremely vague to me, at the age of 6 or 7. Does any of this ring a bell? My hindsighted guess is that it may have had something to do with wind-drift patterns and potential threats of chemical terrorism -- or that the megalomaniacal paranoids in the military community just wanted to see if we'd actually do what they told us to do.
But while we're in that "neighborhood": Do you remember those metal dog tags we all wore on chains around our necks for several years in the mid-1950's? Was that a nationwide project or merely local? I recall having it emphasized to me on innumerable occasions that, because of the presence of McConnell AFB and of Boeing Aircraft and of the ICBM silos in the immediate vicinity, our fair city was considered to be a prime military target, in the event (Heavens forefend!) that World War III were to break out. Therefore, when Miss Robertson (or Mrs. James or whomever) told our class that the dog tags were to help the police find us if we got lost (the way I did, when trying to find my way back home after walking you home one afternoon) . . . when the teacher fed us that line, the only image which came to my geopolitically focused young mind was of all our hopeful little bodies burnt to a crisp in a thermonuclear attack launched by the Soviet Union, with nothing but our blacked little skeletons and those nifty metal dog tags remaining. But, given my father's vividly vocal obsession with biblical apocalypse, this image was, for me, even at the age of 7, neither new nor especially horrifying.
%%%%%%%
But enough (for the time being) about the Cold War component to our childhood in Wichita. Let me close my weary old Irish turtle eyes once again and see what else I can see this time. Ah, yes! There's a more pleasant image! Remember the Pied Piper Bookstore? Of course you do! A couple of doors south of the broadcasting studio of the university's radio station, KMUW, just off 17th Street on Fairmount. No brief description of the Pied Piper could possibly do it justice. It was, of course, "housed" literally in what had been someone's tiny wood-frame house, which actually had, if I recall correctly, a basement, though I don't recall ever being allowed to go down there. The Pied Piper was, of course, on the surface of it, just another used bookstore, a vanishing breed here in 21st century America. But to a hungry-minded little boy growing up in a fairly dull Midwestern city during the Eisenhower years, it was a feast of curiosities and of satisfactions for my curiosities.
When I close my eyes, I can see the inside of the Pied Piper Bookstore as it appeared to me that very first time Steve Sowards (who else!) took me there for my initiatory tour and to introduce me to the owner/proprietor, Jack Whitesell, and his dozen or so cats who lounged around amidst the dusty old books and periodicals or sunned themselves in the windows or nursed a new litter of kittens in the some dark corner, clear at the back of the store, between the moldering boxes of ancient National Geographics and Pre-World War II Life Magazines. Steve & I would have been in the 4th or 5th grade at Fairmount Elementary at the time.
Just in case you never had the pleasure of hanging out for an hour or two in the Pied Piper (way back before Jack finally managed to smoke himself to death sometime in the late 1970's and the store was closed down) I'll describe it for you simply as a very loosely organized jumble of relatively low-quality books and magazines which nobody much wanted but which Jack's loyal customer base of several hundred of us would buy from, every now and then, as much for the sake of pity and/or solidarity as anything. Beneath its tobacco-smoke- cat-urine- moldy-paper- -wreaking surface, the Pied Piper was, at heart, about its spirit and atmosphere, more than about any given element of its molecular reality. I suspect that it stood for an imaginary bohemian zeitgeist which its most loyal patrons (Galen Green foremost among them, from 1959 till 1976 or so) longed to inhabit as a temporary escape from Wichita's more dominant zeitgeists such as the aforementioned bastions of America's military-industrial complex or "Cowtown" or that so-called "amusement park" ironically named "Joyland."
%%%%%%%
To be continued . . .
Galen
November 12, 2007
%%%%%%%
P.S.
Hello Shannon -
Received your very welcome note this morning, just as I was about to send this fifth installment off to you (& yours). Will make every effort to respond in my sixth installment to your most recent thoughts. Thanks so much for taking the time to connect. And thanks again for being exactly the “audience” I need to impel me to write down these reminiscences which I should have recorded long ago. Please feel free to share them with Chris, Steve, etc; as I’m sure you can tell they are, ultimately, intended for a more general audience. Incidentally: from Nov. 16th thru the 26th, my personal schedule will be a bit crazy, so please e-mail anything during that period to both the e-mail addresses at the top of this installment. (Thanks!) Meanwhile, here are the words to a song I wrote back in 1986, in that cemetery on what used to be the northeast corner of Hillside & Kellogg, before they “improved” it. It was near the house at 621 S. Lorraine, which we moved to in the summer of 1965. The song itself could be said, I suppose, to be about a far more general overview of that thing called “the old neighborhood.” Wichita is a stranger to me now. We haven’t been back there since 2002; and before that, not since I moved here after Margaret’s death in 1990 - except for an hour or two when driving through. Do you still have ties there?
Will write more soon, God willing. Enjoy the song. Let me know how you’re doing? Until next time, stay well.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Galen
%%%%%%%
IN THE CEMETERY ABOVE THE INTERSTATE
As I walk amidst the human debris of my city,
These gravestones fail to dazzle my blood.
But a sharp wind from Milwaukee does,
And so I choose to muzzle
Myself with my collar turned up, still I wince,
As I squint out over these labels I am.
December’s bright wind grows intense.
Upon my face, here among the damned.
Once, lost tribes walked in frazzle of genocide,
Here, where immense engines rise and fall and sizzle
Their songs to sing our circumstance.
The far horizon, like a clam of earth and sky,
Seals around the sticky slime of life.
I look out at them, these driven dead,
Hell-bent for nooky.
My tearing eyes take in each ounce of landscape,
Here where the worn-out lacky
That was my father makes perfect sense,
Inside this earth, this fortune cookie.
These pickled corpses cannot guzzle
Another drop of wind or whim,
For they have felt the final fizzle
Snuff out their fuses, sans “BLAM!”
These granite markers, cold and numb,
Endure this wind, this flow, this rinse
Of human madness and the slam
Of storm and war and arrogance.
I wish I had a cup of saki
To warm my hands and light my nozzle.
For this is the weather for playing hockey
To the tune of winter’s icy chisel.
A pine tree sways like a furry lance.
The yellow grass is a sea of bristles.
Far off, the city hums, and hence,
I think of you. This brief epistle
I share with you like a Christmas ham
Is meant to bring you peace when we
Are far apart in Vietnam
Or any hell from which we might wish to be set free.
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986
Performed on Peasant Cantata c 2003
Excerpted here from The Toolmaker’s Other Son
(rough draft copyright 2005 by Galen Green)
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
"A Hundred Autumns" by Galen Green, 1981
A HUNDRED AUTUMNS
Phoebe Evans McCall (1880-1981)
by Galen Green
On my grandmother’s 96th birthday I asked her what memories
Stood out most vividly in her mind, and she replied,
“There have been so many deaths”. So many tragedies.
And she began naming them to me one by one
From her own grandmother to her baby son
And the man with the mustache who had loved her all those years.
She’s with them now on the other side of the door.
Yet we who are still on this side, each of us hears
Her voice inside of us and can not ignore
The fact that we will someday join her on the other side
In that great beyond that God’s mercy will provide.
Those tough and tender hands that most of us can remember
Only as old and knotted from touching a hundred Novembers,
Those hands once washed a baby who became a great-grandfather
And a patriarch in his own right.
How often do any of us ever pause and bother
To consider that those hands – that were – when Sitting Bull was killed
At Wounded Knee – already ten years old
And strong enough and innocent but skilled
Enough to trip the wire to seed the stony earth
Into a world that passed this week with her
Into the forever past. It is like a blur
For me to look at her hundred autumns, her years
That witnessed a world turned upside down by depressions and wars
In 1914 when she was already thirty-four
And again in ’29 and ’41,
And even today the insanity goes on.
Where does a loved one find the words to say
That the last leaf to fall from the tree has blown away
And that that last leaf was a living history
Our last link with a world that’s blown
Into the dark of the past, the mystery
That we shall someday come to know again,
When the door has opened for each of us and then
We shall be again as we once were and she
To whom we pay tribute here today
Shall greet us each with open arms and say
That she had watched each of us make our way
Through our heartaches, losses and regrets
Until we, too, became the leaves that fell
Into the wind and towards our Father who forgets
Our wrongs and leads his children home.
10/28/81
%%%%%%%
Phoebe Evans McCall (1880-1981)
by Galen Green
On my grandmother’s 96th birthday I asked her what memories
Stood out most vividly in her mind, and she replied,
“There have been so many deaths”. So many tragedies.
And she began naming them to me one by one
From her own grandmother to her baby son
And the man with the mustache who had loved her all those years.
She’s with them now on the other side of the door.
Yet we who are still on this side, each of us hears
Her voice inside of us and can not ignore
The fact that we will someday join her on the other side
In that great beyond that God’s mercy will provide.
Those tough and tender hands that most of us can remember
Only as old and knotted from touching a hundred Novembers,
Those hands once washed a baby who became a great-grandfather
And a patriarch in his own right.
How often do any of us ever pause and bother
To consider that those hands – that were – when Sitting Bull was killed
At Wounded Knee – already ten years old
And strong enough and innocent but skilled
Enough to trip the wire to seed the stony earth
Into a world that passed this week with her
Into the forever past. It is like a blur
For me to look at her hundred autumns, her years
That witnessed a world turned upside down by depressions and wars
In 1914 when she was already thirty-four
And again in ’29 and ’41,
And even today the insanity goes on.
Where does a loved one find the words to say
That the last leaf to fall from the tree has blown away
And that that last leaf was a living history
Our last link with a world that’s blown
Into the dark of the past, the mystery
That we shall someday come to know again,
When the door has opened for each of us and then
We shall be again as we once were and she
To whom we pay tribute here today
Shall greet us each with open arms and say
That she had watched each of us make our way
Through our heartaches, losses and regrets
Until we, too, became the leaves that fell
Into the wind and towards our Father who forgets
Our wrongs and leads his children home.
10/28/81
%%%%%%%
"For Phoebe" by Galen Green (circa 1970)
%%%%%%%
For Phoebe
The dickey-bird on your window sill is singing
A lusty lyric to the simmering sun,
Who slyly peeks into the flower bed,
Where a daisy spreads herself, all undone,
Beneath the weight of a pandering honey bee,
While in another corner of the lawn,
A very young and rakish wild oat
Sows himself into the yielding ground.
But above it all, your piety reigns supreme
From the wooden back porch rail on which you lean
And shake your finger at each wicked creature
For its particular sin against God and Nature -
While the easy earth is mounted by the sky
And Summer runs His finger up your thigh.
by Galen Green
Copyright 1970; All Rights Reserved
(first published in The Wichita Free Press, 1970;
reprinted in Apple Grunt, 1971; excerpted here
from The Toolmaker’s Other Son, A Memoir by
Galen Green; rough draft copyright 2005;
All Rights Reserved.)
%%%%%%%
For Phoebe
The dickey-bird on your window sill is singing
A lusty lyric to the simmering sun,
Who slyly peeks into the flower bed,
Where a daisy spreads herself, all undone,
Beneath the weight of a pandering honey bee,
While in another corner of the lawn,
A very young and rakish wild oat
Sows himself into the yielding ground.
But above it all, your piety reigns supreme
From the wooden back porch rail on which you lean
And shake your finger at each wicked creature
For its particular sin against God and Nature -
While the easy earth is mounted by the sky
And Summer runs His finger up your thigh.
by Galen Green
Copyright 1970; All Rights Reserved
(first published in The Wichita Free Press, 1970;
reprinted in Apple Grunt, 1971; excerpted here
from The Toolmaker’s Other Son, A Memoir by
Galen Green; rough draft copyright 2005;
All Rights Reserved.)
%%%%%%%
Sunday, May 18, 2008
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