Musings from Brian J. Noggle

My first exposure to Baxter Black was a folksy column that ran weekly in the Republic Monitor, the weekly paper in the next town over, when I first moved to southwest Missouri. He talked about being a cowboy and humorous anecdotes about the same. However, the paper dropped the column some years ago, likely as a cost-saving move. Or perhaps Baxter retired.

Apparently, Black first became known as a cowboy poet in the 1980s, and this collection of poems and an anecdote/story or two comes from that era. They’re fun to read like Ogden Nash, but with less reliance on vernacular or funny spellings. It’s about being a cowboy and whatnot, but the topic matter doesn’t detract from the fun of it. Perhaps it adds a bit to it.

The book also features cartoonish illustrations by Don Gill and Bob Black that accompany the poems and illustrate the stories therein. They add to it.

I didn’t completely browse this book during football games because I came to a block of prose that looked like a short story, but it was really just a page of prose amid the lyrics. Still, it’s off my sofa-side table.

And if I run across more of Baxter Black in the future, I’ll be sure to pick it up.

I bought this book in October to browse during football games. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be: although this is a book of photography, it wouldn’t do for browsing during a football game because the paragraphs of captions and philosophizing about cacti are in a script typeface, which makes them hard to read. You have to follow along very carefully and can’t jump right back to a place after a football play.

And the photos include a few landscapes with cactus, but with camera and development effects/filters, especially underexposure to darken everything. But most of the photos are close-ups focusing on color and texture. Combined with the script font, this is a design book more than a photography book. Look at how pretty the book is except for the content.

So I was underwhelmed.

I was pleased with knowing who Pavlova is in this caption, though:

Rhythm, light, and balance, like Brancusi and Bach and Pavlova at once.

I know who Anna Pavlova was because I’m well read, and part of that reading is Neo.

So, meh. But it’s off the side table.

Well, those boys have done it to me again. Like Ron Burgandy finding a question mark on his teleprompter, if I find a book on the table beside the sofa, I must read it. Even if I have already read it. In this case, I read this book in 2011. The boys, you may remember, also did this when they shuffled You Can Tell You’re A Midwesterner When… into this same stack.

At any rate, the book hasn’t changed at all: It’s a collection of noteworthy news photos from the very first deguerreotype taken in Paris in 1839 to the highlights of the Carter administration. Many of the images will be familiar, as their iconic images that have generally swayed public opinion in the leftward direction.

This time through, though, perhaps because I now have little adhesive tabs for flagging things in books (I don’t write or highlight in books, much to the disappointment of my college professors who thought it important that I “dialog with the text” by writing in books that I would no longer be able to sell back to the college bookstore or to shelve and never review again unless my kids got it out and put it on my side table), I have highlit some things that are just wrong in the captions:

• In a caption to a photo of Winston Churchill, it says:
  

  England’s darkest hours were eased by Prime Minister Winstone Churchill, who promised the people “blood, sweat, and tears,” but ultimate victory.

  But Churchill did not “promise” “blood, sweat, and tears.” The actual phrase he used in his speech to the House of Commons was:

  I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

  He offered/promised his blood, toil, tears, and sweat–not the listeners’ or just generic bodily fluids.

• About Super Bowl III:
  

  The 1969 Super Bowl was “Broadway Joe’s” best year, and he played brilliantly–leading the Jets to a 16-7 victory over the Baltimore Colts. For the National Football League, it was their first Super Bowl win.

  Sweet Christmas, knowledgeable football fans, even those who have not read a book about that very Super Bowl in the last six months (Countdown to Super Bowl in August) know that the Jets are in the American Football Conference–then the American Football League, and it was that conference’s first Super Bowl victory since the Green Bay Packers won the first two.

When I read trivia books and run across a fact that I know is not true (often planted by the authors/publishers to spot people who use the questions in violation of copyright), I have to doubt everything I read in the book that I don’t already know.

Even in a collection of “news” photos published in 1980, I have to do the same.

This volume is part of a series called Visual Geography Series which includes a number of foreign countries and Alaska and Hawaii. It’s got a color cover, but the interior photographs and maps are in black and white. It’s the second printing, though, so someone bought them.

The book includes sections on the geography, history and government, the people, and industry. In 1966, the country was coming back from the beating it took in World War II, so the industry was relatively fresh, and the people were proud to be reclaiming land from the sea and terraforming their little corner of Europe.

Of course, in the 1960s, the Mackle brothers were doing something similar to Marco Island, Florida. I wonder if the Dutch ran into the same problems, or how Holland has changed in the interim. One expects that the chapter on The People would be very different in the 21st century, but perhaps the text would be the same although the truth might be different indeed.

You know, I would not have minded seeing this Holland. My mother-in-law worked up a geneological study on my Noggle line for Christmas the year before last, and she gave me a calendar of Holland photos as apparently I have deep Dutch roots. I’ve read books set in Holland, including The Fall and Vendetta in Venice (well, partly). So it would have been a nice place to visit.

Although news in recent years leads me to believe that it’s more likely that I’ll travel to Europe as part of an expeditionary force than for fun. But, I guess, time will tell.

Apparently, I already read this book in 2012. I will leave it for you to speculate, gentle reader, whether I bought a second copy of the book or if one of my children took it from my already-read shelves, browsed it, and left it on the side table where I leave books to browse while watching football. Either one would explain how I came to read this book again during a football game this weekend, but to resolve it truly would probably involve me organizing my read shelves which were briefly organized when I first moved to Nogglestead and had a lot of book shelf room relative to the books I owned, but that time has passed.

At any rate, to recap, again: It’s a collection of “Midwestern” sayings, sometimes in vernacular that isn’t necessarily this part of the Midwest or Wisconsin or Minnesota, accompanied by clip art. I said in 2012:

They skew a little northern Midwest than Missouri, and they’re about small town living more than big city quips. A couple of them ring true, with a deeper understanding and statement of small town America than others.

Still true, although perhaps even more true from my current perspective than they had been when I was young in those days, a mere pup of forty.

I mentioned I was reading this book, and now I have completed it.

As I said last week:

I hate to get ahead of my book report here, but it tells stories of famous people from the 1920s to the 1950s and where they are now (in the case of this, the second book, it’s 1968). I mean, these are mostly B and C celebrities from the era, movie and theater stars and athletes who had a brief run at the top. By 2019, one would ask “Who were these people in the first place?”

I find it very interesting because it’s showing that there’s nothing new under the sun. Many of these people have story arcs that match modern celebrities, with multiple divorces and different attempts to come back into the spotlight. But we in the twenty-frst century think we invented all of this stuff, and so many of these people have done it before.

I could stand pretty much on that as my book report, honestly. But the book was more compelling than that: it told me of a world, particularly an entertainment world, that one only glimpses sometimes in Lileks’ work. I recognized very few of the actors and actresses listed, and I recognized almost none of the movies or television programs they starred in. And I fancy myself something of a fan of old black-and-white films. So I’ve resolved to watch at the very least the ones I have in my catalog.

I learned a little more about stars from television programs I barely remember from my childhood (The Bowery Boys’ Leo Gorcey, Our Gang‘s Darla Hood) and the circumstances under which the shows were filmed. (Hey, did you realize that the new The Little Rascals film is twenty-five years old this year? Where are they now?)

I also want to postulate that the old studio system made the rags-to-riches-to-modest living storyline that appears over and over in this book possible, but that would be a facile assertion easily disproven by the A Different World star works at Trader Joe’s thing. So I guess it’s more human nature than anything else; the real story is that stars of our yesterday had more money to blow in their heydey before they came back down to earth (although maybe not Geoffrey Owens).

I also want to postulate that cable television (and now streaming outlets), the Internet, and reality television shows have made it so that actors and celebrities who don’t want to fade away or return to obscurity instead can just keep plugging along at substinence level (both monetarily and in ego gratification) almost indefinitely, and plastic surgery can ensure that they continue to look young or plastic until they die. But that’s a lot of thesis to defend based on 102 brief celebrity profiles from fifty(!) years ago and my own curmudgeonly nature.

So I’ll spare you the postulates.

At any rate, I hope I can remember some of the trivia that I’ve learned in this book (Morton Downey, Sr., was a singer and radio personality; the only man to win two Oscars for the same role was Harold Russell for his role in The Best Years of Our Lives). At the very least, I’ll get a couple blog posts out of it.

Apparently, this book is part of a series that ran for over a decade and ten or more volumes in those days before the Internet. If I come across them in the wild, I’ll surely pick them up, although I wouldn’t be eager to read a whole bunch of them in a row.

This book has all the hallmarks of a tourist pickup book: It’s thin but it’s large, which makes it a good size for pictures, and it has a narrow scope.

This particular book tells the story of man born in the 1870s in Kentucky who goes west when he comes of age, does a little prospecting in Death Valley, but really makes a name and a spectacle of himself when he gets people with a little money back east to give him cash for partnership in a mine that doesn’t exist. He then goes back to California and spends the money profligately, claiming he’s spending his wealth from the gold mine. He gets someone to stake him the money to rent a train from California to Chicago to set the time record for it, claiming that he has rented the train on a whim, and when the train does set the record, he lives off of the celebrity for a while before returning to California.

The book, and the tourist site it promotes, comes from a wealthy Chicago man who starts out as one of Scotty’s marks but comes to realize what Scotty is. The wealthy man continues to fund Scotty for his own amusement and travels to Death Valley to hike and ride with the colorful Death Valley Scotty. The wealthy patron starts to build a place to store his equipment when he travels back to Chicago, and starts to build a home for Scotty, but it morphs into a large undertaking not unlike Hearst Castle. Although The Castle or Scotty’s Castle (which Scotty, of course, told everyone he was building, while the patron played the part of his Chicago banker) was not completed before the Depression stripped the patron of his fun-in-Death-Valley money evaporated, it did grow into a tourist attraction.

An interesting story about a colorful, small-time con man who got into headlines. Too little to be found on a trivia night, but a nice quick read nevertheless.