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!

 

Veteran's Day

 

A Confederate soldier's lament, afraid to go home for fear of what he will find, how it will be.