The good old days

 

 

 

This Bill Mauldin cartoon reminds me of how el jefe was after the birth of our latest.  Of course all newborns are not looking their best.  Right? Right...?

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My favorite era, as I've written, is the decade between, roughly, 1935 and 1945, with the best years being 1940 and 1941 up to Pearl Harbor.  I'm talking about in America.  I don't care about the rest of the stupid world.  I'm very parochial, provincial and insular in my world view --et j'en suis fier!  You betcha.

Anyways, I was reading a general-interest magazine from 1937 and ran across a major multi-page story about a national amateur photo contest.  There was not one picture of a cat, if you can believe it.  Truly, the past is another country.  

There were photos of factories in long-shadowed afternoon light and skyscraper construction workers eating lunch on girders suspended from cranes 50 stories above the ground and farmers plowing fields with teams of horses and skinny rural southern families in clothing made from flour sacks sitting on shack porches and so forth.

But the national award winner was a photo of a naked two-year old.  In fact, there were two pages devoted to the little kid.  To the left is the first page.  I've censored the photos, you will notice.  Now you may say that in those by-gone days, naked children symbolized innocence and I would like to agree with you and I do believe that to a large extent that was true, and also would say that pre-pubescent  children's nudity was taken for granted.  Kids routinely swam naked, for example -- skinny-dipping. 

But then why, in this story, is the little girl described as a baby blonde?  Recall that this was the era when the trope of the blonde bombshell sexpot was created, thanks to Irving Thalberg and Jean Harlow. In earlier times brunettes were the femme fatales and seductresses and blonde hair represented the innocence of youth, but those views were ancient history in the later 1930s.

What struck me even more, though, was the copy explaining how the photos were taken. A middle-aged man walking through a park comes upon mother and daughter and asks mom if he can take pictures of her little girl and she says, oh, sure, snap away.  Then he asks her to have the kid take her clothes off and wade in a pond so he can take pictures of her naked.  The little girl doesn't want to do that, but her mother makes her.  What did mom say to her daughter when the kid says, "But mommy I don't want to!" Did she say, "Shut up you little brat and get naked for the nice man so he can take pictures of you?"  I don't know.  I don't get it at all.  If the guy just wanted to take photos of her wading in the pond, she didn't have to take her clothes off. And why would her mother agree to that?  I mean, really.  If some guy came up to me and my little girl in a park and asked to take naked pictures of her, he had better have his life insurance paid up and his will made out.

And if you insist that I am over-reacting and this was all innocent -- and, okay, maybe it was -- I would point you to a news item (left) in the same issue reporting that a man had murdered three little girls.  The item doesn't directly mention anything sex-related about the killings, but my 21st century cynical and suspicious mind immediately thought that the piece left out one important word: rape.  The man was arrested for raping and murdering three little girls. You can take that to the bank. And the text does talk about sex crimes, so the reader could infer what the man did.

Note in the copy under the photo (enlarged below) it says that those convicted of sex crimes are only fined or sometimes receive a short jail sentence. 
Then we have, also from a 1937 magazine, this teenager on trial for stabbing an "elderly man" who attempted to sodomize him.  The teen described the man as a "sex maniac."  Now there's a phrase that should be brought back into style. 

 I was about to say that there are probably more of those around today than there were back in the good old days, but I hold my tongue.  Twelve years on, we have this truly disgusting incident (right and below left).  Note the first news item, from the Herald-Express, is very circumspect, telling the reader only that there was an arrest on a morals charge involving a young girl who implicated her father -- ! -- and 19 -- ! -- others.  

The second new item covering the same incident, however, from the Daily News, gives more details.  The girl was 14. Her father had sex with her.  She was gang-raped by six men.  She became pregnant and her father arranged for her to have an abortion. The man who performed the abortion had sex with her after he carried out the abortion.

 I can't.... 

The depths of depravity human beings are capable of is beyond my comprehension.  Should you be able to travel to the past in hopes of escaping that, you would be disappointed.  In those bygone years we had brutal heterosexual and homosexual sex crimes, as well as pedophilia, just as today.  And, apparently, most of those arrested for such crimes were only mildly punished and released back on the street to continue in their ways, to the outrage of normal people who wanted these creeps tossed in the slammer and kept there.

Sounds familiar to today, doesn't it?

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
~ Ecclesiastes 1:9

Oh, man.  Now I've gone and ruined my fantasy of fleeing to the innocent past to escape this horrid present. The past was just as bad, but without antibiotics.

Why do I mention antibiotics? 

Um....from 1936:

"Floy-floy" was a slang term for syphilis.  "Flat foot" refers to the way a person with advanced syphilis walks.  The original word in the title of the song was not floogie but floozie, a slang term for a promiscuous woman. It was  bowdlerized for the record, which was a top hit in 1938.

Status?

I was skipping through an on-line yak yak forum when I ran across some brilliant mind asserting that in the 1870-1890 era cowboying was "a low status job."  I paused over that, thinking how people, especially urban/suburban types, project their own attitudes and lifeways onto not only the present but also the past.  I don't know any cowboys from 1880, though I am descended from some, but I do know cowboys in the here and now and you can bet your saddle cinch that the last thing they considered when becoming cowboys, indeed the last thing they ever think about, is social status in the sense that that forum person considered it.  In fact, they don't give the proverbial pest's posterior about any kind of status except maybe that among their peers, but some don't even care about that.  They want nothing to do with a world of social rank, status or prestige.

You know what they want?  Do you really want to know?  Well, I'll tell you.  Or I will tell you what one cowhand told me:  "I want the world to leave me the God-damned hell alone.  A day that passes without me seeing another human being is a damned good day, a week a damned good week."  This a man who may spend weeks alone far out on the range, tending cattle, mending fences, fending off predators, caring for his mounts, eating pan biscuits, pinto beans and side meat, drinking eggshell coffee and smoking a pipe of pouch tobacco when the day is done.

If that is the way a cowpoke is today, can you imagine that 150 years ago cowboys would have been concerned with the social status of their job?  I wonder if they even considered cowboying a job as we think of it.  It was just life.  

A lot of the men who drifted west after the civil war wanted to get away from society, from people.  Of course there were many who went west looking for their fortune, but there were also a lot of disaffected veterans of the war who couldn't ever go back to their old life, so they lit out for the western horizon just to get away, put everything behind them, forget all that was.  They took up the life of the cowpoke because it suited them and because that's about all there was to do to get three squares and a flop.

I've written more about cowboys as I've come to know them, about all I have to say, here if you care to read it. 

Besides cowboys, there are a lot of people who have no interest in society, certainly not social status, and prefer to go their own way.  They prefer nature to the world of man.

 “One could starve to death on an enviable job — for mountain wind, for stars
among pine trees, or the call of a wood-thrush to his mate.”
― Barbara Newhall Follett

I think most people can't even understand what motivates such mavericks, if I may call them that.  But I feet very much kin to them.  My brother the forest ranger does even more so.  For him the happiest life lies out of doors, far into the wilderness.  He's told me that he feels as if he were born centuries after his true time, that his real life, the life he was born to live, was of a mountain man in the early 1800s, traveling alone through the far high country, living by hunting and trapping, encumbered by nothing more than a Hawken rifle, axe, Bowie knife and possibles bag filled with powder, shot, flint and steel, mending needles, and some salt.

I wonder how many others feel that way, perhaps not pining for the life of a mountain man or cowboy, but maybe that of an early 19th century sailor as depicted in the stories of Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville.  Or maybe they dream of a life as a yeoman farmer on a quarter section, growing and raising all they need for life, visiting a market town on fair days to sell their surplus but otherwise living on their own.  Others may wish to have lived in a time when they just could have been a rover and rambler, a Johnny Appleseed, with no fixed abode, no fixed profession, no fixed anything, just letting their feet take them hither and yon as they listeth. 

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof,
but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth." .
~ John 3:8

 

Give to me the life I love,
  Let the rest go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
  And the byway night me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
  Bread I dip in the river --
There's the life for a one like me,
  There's the life for ever.

Let the blow fall soon or late,
  Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around
  And the path before me.
Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,
  Nor a friend to know me;
All I seek, the heaven above
  And the earth below me.

Or let autumn fall on me
  Where afield I linger,
Silencing the bird on tree,
  Biting the blue finger;
White as meal the frosty field --
  Warm the fireside haven --
Not to autumn will I yield,
  Not to winter even! 

~ Robert Louis Stevenson 

And you can quote me!

 

An idling brain

 I've come to enjoy flying the Baron quite a lot.  I am more relaxed in it than I am in the B18.  Besides being quieter and more comfortable, everything about it is just easier, and, of course, the avionics are helpful in so many ways.  You can certainly fly with a handful of round gauges providing minimal information, but what you can know and do with glass....  No comparison.  And no more tail wheel taxiing, take-offs and landings.  Whew!

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I flew the Baron to take my favorite uncle to his dermatologist a while back for his annual exam.  Two or three years ago I drove him there -- a long drive -- and afterwards he knocked back a few (a few?) at a bar and got a little frisky on the drive home and I let him know he was walking back if he didn't settle down.  Which he did.  I got into it with my mother about him, though, and her advice was to let it go and not let him being a fool wreck our friendship.  I followed that advice, even joking about it with him, and all has been good between us.  

But not of adult men! Grrr...

This time, to tease him, I thought I'd sleaze up my ensemble for the lulz and el jefe, who gets along swell with the guy, approved, but my mother saw me and demanded to know what in the Good Lord's name I was doing dressed like that.  I felt like I was 16 again and getting read the riot act after trying to sneak out of the house to meet my boyfriend.  I kind of liked it.  So nostalgic.  Reminded me of all the fun times evading parental supervision.  But I changed to a burka.  Okay, no I didn't.  I put on some Wrangler cowboy-cut jeans and a Pendleton board shirt.  Driving him from the airport to his appointment, unc commented that I flew better than I drove.  I asked him once again when was the last time he hitchhiked.

After uncle's exam, he came out beaming, with a clean bill of health.  He remarked on both the doctor and her assistant being females and how much he enjoyed his full body exam by them.  That guy....  I told him he was a randy old goat and he said, "You bet I am!"  

But once he remarked on it I did realize that there was not a man, other than patients, in the entire joint: receptionists, physicians assistants, nurses, doctors, every one a female.  Where were the men?

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The other day while checking in at a new dentist -- the old white guy retired and his practice was bought by an Oriental woman -- filling out a bunch of stupid forms that had the same information as the old ones, I put down my husband's name as my emergency contact and when I handed in the forms the receptionist, a girl in her early twenties, looking it over asked if he was my partner.  I said no, he's my husband.  The word "husband" seemed to annoy her and she became rather cool, whereas before she had been quite friendly.  Fortunately, none of the forms asked for the name of the head of household, because I would have put his name down there, too, causing her head to explode.
I wasn't trying to be confrontational or make a statement or anything, I just said what was true.  But, apparently, the word "husband" is triggering, as they say these days.  I guess I should have just said he's the guy I let climb on top of me whenever he wants and make Dagwood sandwiches for.  But if I had she probably would have stabbed me through the gizzard with her selfie stick.
Oh, right, I told her she was very pretty and would have no trouble getting a man if she would drop at least a hundred pounds and lose the beached whale look.  She did not receive this advice well.  What? Me, catty? Perish the thought!
But you know, I think "husband" is one of the nicest words in the English language.  I like having one and I think el jefe likes being one.  Partner?  What is that?  The second fiddle in one of those old western serials from the 1940s? Gabby Hayes to Gene Autry?  Pat Buttram to Roy Rogers? Get out of here! Geez.  El jefe is not comic relief.  Trust me on that.
Well, okay, sometimes. Yeah, pretty often.  All right, not a day goes by that he doesn't make me laugh.
 

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 I was chatting with my friend the vet tech the other day.  She has a boyfriend she wants to rope and hogtie and she asked me what makes for a good, stable marriage.  I reminded her of the old saying that a woman marries a man expecting he will change and he doesn't, and a man marries a woman expecting her to stay the same and she doesn't, so avoid that trap.  What your man is today he will always be, so if you are satisfied with him as he is now, let him be, and you yourself should stay as you are because that's what attracted him to you.  So don't pretend to be what you are not to lure him in and then revert to your real self once you've hobbled him.  Be yourself and if he likes that, you're good to go.  

Also, of course, don't get fat, and stay fit.  And, really important, remember that one of the main reasons a man gets married is because he wants to secure a steady source of sex.  Don't cut that off from him. If you don't like sex, you probably should reconsider getting married. All those bitter jokes about celibate marriages contain a sad and sober truth.  Don't contribute to it. Keep in mind what the Vogue and Glamor writer Mignon McLaughlin said -- "Sex is an appetite for women, but a hunger for men." It's true. You and I may be able to take it or leave it, but he can't. He's gotta have it.

My personal rule is that el jefe can plow me whenever he wants. I
encourage him to do so, not that he needs much encouragement. I will also be his photo and artist's model. He likes wood carving and is now whittling a statue of me out of an old box elder log using a hatchet and a power sander.  It kind of looks like me.  If you squint.

I like him and want to please him, and in my case, even if I am not in the mood for a bit of the old horizontal hula, if he is, the fact that he desires me turns me on; it excites me to excite him. And, I have to admit, I do enjoy the weight of a man.  So we both have a great time.  If he came on to me and I said, not now dear, I'm trying to make a soufflé or I'm changing the baby's diaper or my spinster aunt's NOW chapter is meeting in the next room and you know how thin the walls are, I would miss out on that and make him frustrated and unhappy.  I never want to frustrate him and I always want to make him happy.   And that's not just for his advantage. It's for mine, too.  I like him.  Very much. And I want to keep him.

But beyond all this, I told my friend, beyond being a congenial companion, a hot babe and great lay, a good cook, a good housekeeper and an attentive and sympathetic listener among other things a wife must be, there is one more thing that you should aspire to acquire as soon as you can to ensure tranquility between you and your husband, and that is separate bathrooms.  If the bathrooms lead to separate walk-in closets, even better.  The wife's should have an alcove with a make-up vanity with a tri-fold mirror, and a full-length tri-fold mirror in the walk-in.  The husband should also have a den or man-cave where he can pursue his hobbies, display his professional awards, sports trophies, etc.  

It would also be good to have a rec room with a bar if he is an imbiber, someplace where he can invite his friends over to watch the game or whatever.  You can fix snacks for them, serve drinks, and if they are watching the World Series or the US Open, once in a while ask who has made the latest touchdown or scored a goal.  Ask if the Steelers made the Series and when they say they're football not baseball, say "Foot ball...is that the one where they hit the ball with their head or is that tennis?" That's so they can groan and feel superior to some dumb broad.  Guys always like that. If your husband is not the jealous type (which if he is too much of you shouldn't have married him), you can dress in something sexy, be a home-made Hooters, Twin Peaks or Tilted Kilt girl (and let hubby know he doesn't have to go to those places for eye candy, he has better at home) and have some fun yourself bantering with the boys. Those boys will later say to him that they wished they had a wife like his so you are reinforcing your value.   In addition, if you do dress that way, it will encourage the guys to show off and do stupid stuff, which is always entertaining. I'm always happy to follow them outside and hold their beer.