Patricia eventually became widely known as “the Troll,” one of the most popular characters in my humor pieces. I am happy to report she was immensely proud of the title, and sometimes received letters addressed only to “Troll.”
At age seven, I taught myself to read. I pulled a third-grade reader off the shelf, climbed up on my bed, opened it to the first story, and told myself, “I’m not leaving this bed until I can read this story perfectly.” I already knew phonics, from having been raised in country schoolrooms practically from the time I was born. I sounded my way through that story a dozen times. Eventually, I perceived that the story was about peanuts, mainly about how they were grown. It was the stupidest story I’ve ever read. The only interesting thing I learned from it was that peanuts are grown under the ground, not on top of it, as I had assumed. But from then on, I knew how to read.
At supper that evening, I told my mother, “I learned to read today.”
She said, “That’s nice. Pass the potatoes.”
When we moved back to our little farm three miles north of Sandpoint, Idaho, I frequented the county library at least once a week. The librarian back then remains one of my heroes. Her name was Mary McKinnon. Mary directed me to all kinds of books over the years, including my days as a graduate student in college. She had put together a wonderful library on the second floor of Sandpoint’s City Hall. For some unknown reason, I became fascinated with the Bobbsey Twins books when I was in third grade. Even now I can recall their names—Flossie and Freddie. (Or maybe Fanny and Fred? My memory isn’t that good anymore.) No doubt Mary tried to direct me to more advanced reading, but I doubt she succeeded until I had read every last one of the Twins series, at least those about Flossie and Freddie. Looking back, I have not the slightest idea what so fascinated me about those two chubby little characters.
Early on in life, I decided to be an artist. In my mind, painting would give me the greatest degree of freedom. I would paint pictures and sell them, and then be free to do whatever else I wanted. When I reached college age, my high school art teacher told me that the art department at Washington State College was the best around. So I decided to go there, even though it was out of state and my tuition would be much higher than at the University of Idaho. Fortunately, I had made and saved quite a lot of money working for farmers the summer after my high school sophomore year, and construction the summers after my junior and senior years. One of my best jobs was as a high-scaler, where my crew of four hung by ropes over sheer cliffs and cleared them of loose rock. It was dangerous work—but the advantage was that if the foreman wanted to yell at you, he had to come down the side of a cliff on a rope to do it. Then one day a high-scaler on one of the crews got killed, and the superintendent decided that from then on no one under eighteen could work as a high-scaler. I was seventeen, and so lost the best job I’ve ever had. There is a great sense of freedom that comes from dangling over a cliff on a rope.
The following year, I enrolled at Washington State College as an art major, with the intent of becoming another Norman Rockwell. Alas, the WSC art faculty hated Norman Rockwell and his art, particularly his Saturday Evening Post covers. As a result, I was totally lost in regard to what direction I might pursue in terms of a future career. At the same time, I was not doing well in Freshman Composition. My instructor, one Milton Pederson, was tough! Every week, we comp students had to write a composition. After five or six weeks, I had received nothing but Ds and Fs.
Then one day, Milt said, “Look for the telling detail,” and it was as if a bomb went off in my head. Suddenly I knew what writing was all about. My grades began to improve. Right away I had a major breakthrough: a D-plus! Then came a C-minus, followed by a whole C, and so on to the end of the quarter. On my last essay, Milt awarded me an A-plus and a recommendation for Honors English. My essay, by the way, was about Norman Rockwell. Scarcely had I learned what an irony was than I had committed one.
Many years later, I was at a dinner for a large number of people and Milt happened to be there, so I told the story about receiving an A-plus in his class. Milt roared out, “I never gave an A-plus in my entire life!” But he had. And he had singlehandedly turned me into a writer.
By my sophomore year I was selling features to the Lewiston Morning Tribune. Although I would have a series of actual jobs for the next twenty-five years, my major drive was finally to make a living at freelance writing. This happened in the 1960s, although I would continue with actual employment for a few more years.
My stories in those early years were based on facts, requiring research and photography, but it was all exciting and wonderful. I wrote for two hours a night, seven nights a week. Perhaps the one distinguishing element in my factual stories is that I tried to include humor in each of them. Two of those stories are included in this collection: “Wild Life in a Room with a View,” first published in Sports Illustrated, later abridged in Reader’s Digest, and “There Goes the Indian with the Digital Wristwatch,” published in TV Guide. Those two stories formed the pinnacle of my career as a factual freelance writer. I probably could have continued as a factual writer from then on, but a peculiar thing happened.
One night I finished an article in the first hour of my two-hour writing schedule. It was about the use of telemetry in the study of wildlife, hooking up assorted wild creatures with radio transmitters so scientists could study their movements at night. Because I stuck fiercely to my two-hour writing schedule, I decided to write a piece of nonsense to fill up my second hour. My head was already crammed with factual information about telemetry, so I decided to write a piece of nonsense about it, the comic idea being that eventually all wildlife would be hooked up with radio transmitters, which would simplify hunting immensely. I knocked off the piece of nonsense in an hour, stuck it in an envelope, sent it to Field & Stream, and forgot about it. I had a rule in those days that everything I wrote, no matter how bad I thought it was, I sent off to a magazine (a confession some critics have picked up on). Weeks passed. And then one day I went out to our mailbox and there was a small envelope from Field & Stream. My heart leaped. Writers place major importance on the size of envelopes they receive from publishers. Large envelopes contain the rejected manuscript; small envelopes contain checks. This small envelope contained a check for $350. That may not seem like a lot of money, but it transformed me. Writing factual articles is hard, time-consuming work requiring much travel and research. A factual article I had just published had paid me $750, but I had spent weeks researching and writing it. Now here was a check for $350, payment for a piece of nonsense that had taken me an hour to write. I did some rapid calculations and was instantly transformed into a humor writer. Within a year, I had more markets than I could keep up with, and the rates of payment grew with every sale. Suddenly I had achieved the goal I had set for myself at that little log cabin school in the backwoods of Idaho—freedom! That freedom required that I work all the time, of course, but it was still freedom, and that freedom eventually took me all over the world, beyond anything I had ever imagined as a seven-year-old.
Along the way, I acquired a wife, Darlene, also known in my stories as “Bun.” There is an essay in this collection that tells of my pursuit of her. I was still in high school when I met her, and she was already in college with a boyfriend in the service. The odds were heavily against me, but I’ve never been good at math and couldn’t calculate them. Along the way, we accumulated a huge family: four daughters, five grandsons, four granddaughters, one great-grandson, and three great-granddaughters. The cost of college tuitions has curtailed my freedom considerably, but what’s so great about freedom anyway? The family is terrific.
In the mid-1970s I packaged up thirty or so of my published humor pieces and started sending them around to book publishers. As usual, rejection letters started flowing in. Sometimes I would send the package to one publisher and get it back from another. Eventually, I would find out that the editor at the first publisher had really liked the stories and wanted to do a bo
ok, but the marketing department had turned it down. The marketing department! And here I thought editors were in charge. The first editor would then send the manuscript to a friend of his at another publisher and that editor would return the manuscript to me, usually with a note saying he really liked it but the marketing department . . .
After several months of rejections, I was offered a teaching job at a university in Guadalajara, Mexico. We packed up the kids and left. The very day after we had a phone installed in our Guadalajara apartment, I got a phone call from two different publishers wanting the book. I took the first one to call, naturally. An hour after the second call, I got a call from an agent wanting to represent me. Someone at the publishers had called him about me. Publishers prefer to work with agents rather than writers, I don’t know why. So you see, everything works backward in the publishing world. I think the two books I’m working on now will bring my total to twenty-five, but I’m too old and tired to get up and count them.
And that, in a nutshell, is how I became a writer.
Big
P
erhaps the most overused word in the vocabulary of outdoorsmen is big. For example, when you ask how a fishing trip went, the angler replies, “Oh, I caught several small ones, but mostly they were big.” The listener must evaluate this information. “Big,” in this context, depends on the size of the small ones. If the small ones were six-inchers, the big ones may only have been ten-inchers, scarcely what we would normally refer to as big fish. I point this out not in the way of criticism but in the interest of precision. On the other hand, I would not wish to deprive any fisherman of his use of the vague. A reputation often depends on it, and I certainly don’t intend to put the reputation of any outdoorsman in jeopardy. What else do we have?
The use of big in reference to any outdoor activity—other than fishing, of course—can actually be dangerous. I remember as a youngster camping out with friends one time on Schweitzer Creek. It was a tiny stream tumbling out of a narrow mountain canyon a couple miles from where we lived. An hour’s hike up the canyon took us to one of the world’s greatest camping spots. Any kid who grows up without knowing such a campsite is seriously deprived. If I had time, I would get a certain congressman I know to pass a law against such an occurrence. (He no doubt would undertake this chore for me, but I don’t know if he has been released yet.)
The unique feature of this campsite was that it required no tent. Sometimes we took a tent anyway, but only because we wanted to. (What’s the point of having a tent if you don’t use it?) The reason a tent wasn’t required was because a high cliff rose up from the ground and slanted out over half or more of the rocky beach on which we camped. If it rained— there was something about our camping trips that triggered rain—we could build our campfire under the cliff, cook and eat our meals there, and spread out our sleeping bags to sleep while staying dry.
The little stream tumbled by the edge of the beach, and for a while at least, we could catch our breakfast right out of the pool that had been formed and stocked with fish perhaps a thousand years ago just for our benefit. An endless supply of firewood lay right at the edge of our camp. It was not quite under the cliff, so sometimes we had to put up with the discomfort of getting damp in the rain while we chopped a day’s supply of firewood from a big cedar tree that had fallen across the creek. In the ten years or so that we camped at the site, our gathering of firewood did not make a dent in the tree. The last time I saw it, the cedar looked as if it had been gnawed on by a discriminating beaver and then abandoned.
Now, what was I writing about? Oh, yes, big. I did mention a big cedar, but, of course, you have no idea how big the big cedar was. If I said the cedar was as wide as a sidewalk and that you could cross to the other side of the creek on it without being scared of falling in, you would perhaps grasp the concept of “big”—in this case, at least. So here we had not only an infinite supply of firewood, but easy access to the other side of the creek provided by a single tree. What more could you ask of big?
One extremely dark night—actually, because of the depth and narrowness of the canyon, all of the nights were extremely dark—my friends and I suddenly heard an enormous racket over by the big cedar.
“What is it?” I whispered to Norm.
“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “But it’s big!”
Vern nudged me in the back. “Can Norm see what’s making that racket?”
“I think so,” I whispered to him. “He says it’s big!”
Kenny nudged Vern. “What’s making that racket?”
“Norm says it’s big!”
“Big? It’s gotta be a bear!”
Vern nudged me. “Kenny says it’s a bear!”
“Cripes,” I said. I nudged Norm. “It’s a bear!”
“Oh, no!” he hissed, which is an expression that is hard to hiss—unless, of course, you have a big bear ten feet away from you.
It was a matter of considerable comfort to me that I had Norm between me and the bear. Norm, at the time, was a little fat kid and, I suspected, would provide the bear with a rather tasty hors d’oeuvre. By the time the bear was done snacking on Norm, I could be at the tiptop of the nearest pine.
Suddenly, the racket stopped. This could be a bad sign! Fortunately, for the rest of the night, not a single sound came from the big cedar. All four of us could attest to that, because none of us got any more sleep.
The next morning, we discovered that the racket had been made by a chipmunk gnawing his way into and through a bag of potato chips. Not only did one of the smallest of woodland creatures deprive us of a night’s sleep, but he also ate one of our basic camp foods! You lose your potato chips on an outing, and you’re as good as done for. It was a lucky thing for that chipmunk that he didn’t show his smug face around our camp again. He would have been in big trouble!
I went to elementary and high school in a tough little logging town. Although it has been some time since I was in first or second grade, I can still recall the dreaded cry issued by one of my small compatriots: “Watch out! Here come the big kids!” This warning probably referred only to those male pupils in the fourth or fifth grades, who themselves were probably not all that big. Well, some of them were big. In those years, you didn’t get past fourth grade until you could read, spell, and do fractions. I remember one kid—I’ll call him Jethrow—who had been in fourth grade for at least three years. There were rumors that he was already shaving and perhaps dating the teacher, but I doubt they were true. He wasn’t her type. But occasionally there was a really big kid in fourth or fifth grade. In any case, whenever the “big kid” alarm was sounded, we would take off, running for our lives. It was scary. Looking back, I don’t recall any of us little kids ever being caught and tormented by a big kid. They were simply satisfied to take over the swings, slides, and merry-go-rounds we had so summarily abandoned. Nevertheless, such was the effect on me that the shout, “Here come the big kids!” still makes me cast sharp looks in all directions. You never know.
A conservative friend of mine was outraged recently— actually, he is more or less in a continuous state of outrage— by government laws that protect the wimps from the strong. He quoted Winston Churchill as saying, “If we have laws protecting the wimps from bullies, we will end up a nation of wimps!” When I was six or seven years old, I certainly would have supported any law that stated: “Big kids are no longer allowed to torment little kids.” But when my conservative friend raised his objection to such a law, I myself, now an adult, was outraged. I’m a big fan of Churchill and can’t imagine him ever using the word “wimps.”
I asked my friend if, whether during his early years in school, he had ever been alarmed by the cry, “Here come the big kids!”
“Of course not,” he said. “I was one of the big kids!”
I can still recall one of my four daughters, as a child, hopping about and yelling, “You took the big half!” As a college English professor at the time, I had worked tirelessly to correct the
girls’ errors of speech. “There is no such thing as a big half,” I’d point out. “A half is a half. You might, for example, have said, ‘You took the bigger piece.’”
“OK, then, you took the bigger piece! How about that?”
“That’s much better,” I’d say. “But I deserve the bigger piece because I’m so much bigger.”
$7,000 TV Historical Extravaganza
A
s any TV executive will tell you, $7,000 doesn’t go very far toward producing a historical extravaganza. Take, for example, the experience of the special events people at KHQ-TV in Spokane, Washington, who produced Trailblazers, a bicentennial series based on regional history.
After they had rounded up their actors and 150 extras; provided horses, costumes, and authentic weapons; built sets; and put on a couple of full-scale battles, there was scarcely enough money left over to buy beer for the cast.
Producer Ivan Munk, known among the cast as “Cecil B. De Munk,” admits that some of the money probably wasn’t spent to the best advantage. “That’s one of the problems with inexperience,” he says. “But with what we know now, we could probably put on Gone with the Wind for a couple thousand.”
The six-part series dramatizes the building of the Mullan Road over the Rocky Mountains; a Jesuit missionary’s work with the Indians in the early 1800s; the struggles of a crippled grandmother and her 77-year-old brother-in-law making their way alone to Oregon in the winter of 1846; the defeat of a company of U.S. cavalry by the allied Indian tribes of the Spokane area; the founding and colorful history of Spokane (done as a monologue); and the last major battle between the Indians and the Army in Washington Territory. The actors were mostly from amateur theatrical groups, chiefly volunteers. Extras included businessmen, ranchers, teachers, students, housewives, children, old people, and, for all anyone knows, maybe a few actual Indians.
The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories Page 3
