Books
Sunday, January 14, 2007
And Now Look What's in the Paper!
Me! And my mom! And our little history book! If you click through to the article, note how my mom says I *was* in the Internet industry (she claims the reporter took it out of context). I’ll have you know I try to work at least two hours a day, Mother!
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Outlaws, Dynamite, and Really Nice People
Sometimes people do really, really nice things! Take my friend Taki Telonidis at the Western Folklife Center for example. When I asked him for advice about how to clean up a 1970s cassette recording of my great grandfather explaining how he and his brother moved a herd of horses from Montana to Washington in 1903, Taki said, “Oh, just send me the file. I’d be more than happy to do it for you.” He made it sound like it was just a lil’ ol’ thing, but after receiving his new and improved version in the mail a few days ago, I’m pretty sure he spent a fair amount of time on it. I was so excited (and grateful) that I converted it to streaming Quicktime over the weekend so I could share it here with you. There are still a few parts where it is difficult to understand (particularly right at the beginning), but there are some things technology still can’t fix.
Great Grandpa Jack was just a teenager when most of this story takes place, and it is not short on thrills and excitement. There is even some gunplay as they try to cross the Flathead Reservation without paying the required toll. They had very little money at the time and simply couldn’t afford it (at one point they even have to trade horses for food). One of the things that interested me most about his tale, though, is the political and sociological picture he paints of life in the Northwest around the time of the trip.
His brief mention of the dynamite-induced destruction at the Bunker Hill Mine in Idaho was something I’d never heard about before, and I immediately had to find out more. What I learned is there were large and violent labor strikes in 1892 and 1899 at the mine because Bunker Hill had managed to remain non-unionized. When Governor Frank Steunenberg--who entered office as both a Democrat and a Populist--asked the federal government to send troops to quell the unrest in 1899, the miners felt betrayed. The troops rounded up and held hundreds of men in “bullpens” without hearings or formal charges, and a few even died. Steunenberg was later killed by a bomb at his home in 1905. Big Bill Haywood, a prominent figure in the labor movement at the time (and a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World), was one of three people charged but later acquitted due to lack of evidence. I recently picked up the very thick and detail-packed Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America by J. Anthony Lukas, which is about these events. I’ve only read a few chapters so far, but I feel comfortable recommending it if this sort of stuff interests you.
Additionally, Grandpa talks about the outlaw Harry Tracy, who escaped from an Oregon prison in 1902 and (according to Grandpa) shot up Cle Elum, Washington, as well as some other places before finally being tracked and killed by a posse. Hollywood made a movie about it in the 1980s starring Bruce Dern and, it turns out, Gordon Lightfoot (Sundown, you better take care...)? Anyway, Grandpa claimed to have owned one of Tracy’s guns.
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Thursday, May 11, 2006
Of Pigs and Pork
My friend Nadav is probably the only person who can truly understand the wave of emotion I experienced as I spied the 1956 edition of Meat from Ranch to Table tucked in Evany’s bookcase a few days ago. During the Hits.org years, he found this piece of meat industry propaganda (packaged just for kids!) among several boxes of tattered library books that a school was giving away. We brought it back to the office with us where it took its rightful place among the other treasured Webmonkey relics, like the shriveled-up eggplant named Renee that thau! was so fond of sending anonymously to unsuspecting co-workers. Somehow, Renee always found her way back home, but we thought for years that the book had been lost in the great exodus that ensued after a certain East Coast search engine company acquired ours. It turns out, though, that while Nadav and I were reminiscing about the good times we had with Meat from Ranch to Table, Evany had pulled it from the slow-burning metaphorical ashes of what was once our workplace, and has been carefully guarding it ever since.
I can’t speak for Nadav, but I loved that book because it reminded me of another I had as a kid. I paid $5.95 at Main Street Feed for Small-Scale Pig Raising by Dirk van Loon (still five stars on Amazon!). That was back when I was ten and embarking on my first career as a pig farmer. After that came babysitter, marijuana plant hydrater (which didn’t last long once my parents found out), biscuit maker, drive-thru queen, copy store clerk, AV technician, journalist, and eventually Web consultant and aspiring filmmaker. I can’t remember where I got the money to pay for the book, but my folks fronted me $100 to purchase two red Durocs whom--after a few days of careful observation--I named Trouble, after her ability to sniff it out with her snout, and Ignatowski, after Reverend Jim on Taxi. I think I just liked the way that name felt when I said it. A couple years later I also had a pig named Woodrow Wilson, and I am pretty sure there would have been a Calvin Coolidge and probably a Herbert Hoover if I had stayed in the hog business long enough. (Boy, for a period there, America sure seemed to be swayed by the alliterative candidates.)
On most days I would come home after school, grab my pig cane, and earnestly run them around the yard with the hope they would develop huge but not overly muscular hams. A nice big juicy butt would earn us high marks in the judging when it came fair time. Iggy and Trouble would snort and hop around when I let them out of their pen. Sometimes they would chase butterflies or the chickens. I often struggled to pull them with my cane from their determined rooting in my mom’s flowerbeds. And on days when it was hot and they couldn’t find any mud close by, they’d shade up under an apple tree, and I’d lie down with them and wait for a breeze. Just me and my pigs and all that pastoral pleasantness.
How could Iggy and Trouble have possibly known then that come August I would sell them out for cute school clothes and another chance at the big money the following year? Someday, when I’m feeling up to it, maybe I’ll tell you about the day we Windbiglers had to part with Trouble. All I’ll say now is...it wasn’t pretty.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Who Knew?
Find your own pose!
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Evany's Book is Here!
I used to think Evany Thomas was the funniest, cleverest cream puff I’d ever met, but that was before she forced me--one hot summer day a couple years ago-- to march over a hill that was so steep I swear it looked just like a big humped-up brontosaurus crapping in silhouette against the day’s cartoon-blue sky (and it just so happened we were approaching turd side). Our legs and lungs were already burning from the first few hours of the hike, and it would have been pretty easy to walk around this hill, but it turns out that Evany Thomas (and I use her full name here because that’s the way she leaves it on my answering machine, I guess in fear that I might confuse her with some other Evany) is the type of person who has to climb the mountain just because it is there. Late last year, she wrote her first book, The Secret Language of Sleep: A Couple’s Guide to the Thirty-Nine Positions, which is both clever AND funny, and arriving in stores as I type this! I’ll let you decide if it’s creamy and/or puffy, but I am certain you’ll want one. I don’t need to threaten you or anything, right?
Friday, April 07, 2006
Blocksburg Book Featured in Quarterly
It’s not like any decent person would ever write a bad review of a poor lil’ ol’ local history book, but everyone who worked on Children from Our One-Room Schools was pleased with the nice write-up the Humboldt Historical Society gave the book in the recent edition of its quarterly magazine. It looks like the folks up there have put the review on their website, so I thought I’d share.
