Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  A tough old dame, yet beneath the bulldog exterior lurked a sensitive soul. “Rassy was a lady,” said close friend Nola Halter. “Her manners were impeccable—after every gathering was a phone call or a note or a gift. Rassy didn’t forget people. Y’know, some people can swear and still be a lady. I loved her. I understood her. Many people didn’t, but Rassy didn’t give a damn.”

  Rassy didn’t give a damn for her son’s biographer, either, as she made abundantly clear to anyone within earshot the moment I left New Smyrna Beach. Due to her precarious health, I had rushed off to talk to her immediately upon starting this project. My only previous background on Neil’s childhood had come from his father’s 1984 book, Neil and Me. Rassy brought up the book almost upon my arrival, complaining angrily and endlessly about its lack of veracity. “It’s all wrong. I made Scott take a lotta the stuff out—‘Take it out or I’ll sue.’” When I inquired about specific passages in an attempt to set the record straight, she threatened to sue me. “I’m not going to discuss that book any further,” she’d say, then ten minutes later she’d begin ranting all over again. *

  Nor were Neil’s highfalutin showbiz friends exempt from the hot seat. “David got mad at me once. He said, ‘I’m sick of people sayin’, “Are you David Crosby?”’ I said, ‘Tell ’em you’re Eric Clapton.’ God, did he get mad. I can still see his face. Ask a stupid question …” She rolled her eyes. Even the famous son suffered Rassy’s caustic comments, as witnessed by her review of “Mother Earth,” a solo electric song Neil had recently performed at “Farm Aid, Band Aid—whatever the hell it is. Neil sang that song for me. I was horrified. The guitar sounded like Jimi Hendrix playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” Rassy made a face like a constipated bulldog.

  “I told Neil the thing was garbled. I knew damn well he’d done it on purpose. There’s no point in writing a song with a message if you’re gonna distract everybody with the racket the music makes. That isn’t music. Well, it isn’t.”

  While I was there, Neil called and said, just before he hung up, “Tell my mother I love her.” Which I dutifully repeated, although if it registered Rassy didn’t let on. She seemed hungry for any scrap of information I could offer on her son and tried to laugh off his mystery. “Neil can disappear while you’re blinkin’ your eye,” she told me. “And half the time he looks like so many other damn people it slays me. I got a picture around here where you’d swear he was John Davidson.”

  Neil was as elusive to his mother as to anyone else, but when I looked into Rassy’s eyes I saw him. Both mother and son possessed the same fierce, thousand-yard stare that when it locked on your eyes seemed to conduct a brief autopsy on your soul. Neil had no greater supporter in life than his mother and he was a devoted and dutiful son. But she could drain you. As Scott put it with some affectionate humor, “It was not a mistake Rassy lived in Florida and Neil lives in California.”

  Born October 16, 1918, Edna Blow Ragland was the youngest of three very spunky and independent sisters—Virginia, Lavinia and Edna—nicknamed by their father Snooky, Toots and Rassy. “I was a spoiled brat,” recalled Rassy. “I played golf and tennis and swam and drove around in my car and charged the gas to Daddy.”

  “Daddy” was Bill Ragland, fondly remembered by scores of Canadians who made his acquaintance. “Half of Winnipeg called him Daddy,” said Rassy proudly. Raised on a plantation near Petersburg, Virginia, Bill Ragland was the son of a banker whose roots stretched back to the first British settlers in the state. He would proudly recall that his grandfather had freed the slaves on the plantation, but this didn’t prevent Bill from nicknaming a family cat “Nigger” or demanding that a black man ride in the back of a train. “Daddy wasn’t exactly racist, but he was southern,” said Virginia “Snooky” Ridgeway.

  The Raglands were a prominent family and lived well. They had the first radio and first gramophone in Winnipeg, and even during the Depression the family had a maid. As Rassy stated, “We never went without a damn thing ever.” Mother Pearl was an expert seamstress who kept her three girls among the best dressed in Manitoba.

  Bill and Pearl married in 1911. Both had emigrated to Winnipeg from the United States, neither of them taking Canadian citizenship. “Daddy was American from day one—he voted in the States,” said Snooky. “Just the fact that he ran Winnipeg politics didn’t mean he had to vote there.” Toots recalled her father’s fury over an anti-American poem that had been introduced into her school curriculum. “He went steaming over to the school and raised hell. I was very startled, because it was the only time I can remember him intervening.”

  For the most part, the Ragland family lived just across the Red River from Winnipeg in the Norwood district. One-forty-five Monck Avenue was a sprawling house and as close to a southern mansion as Bill Ragland could find. As western district manager for the Barrett Roofing Company, Bill Ragland was a man of few words and great influence. “An expert manipulator,” said Snooky, who maintained that her father “looked after his girls in a very silent way.”

  Bill worked, hunted and played cards at Winnipeg’s Carleton Club. “He spent as little time at home as he could manage,” said Toots. “I have the utmost respect for Daddy as a businessman, as a father and as a hunter; I don’t hold him in high esteem as a husband,” said Snooky. “I think the marriage fell apart early on, but they raised the children with every effort to keep us from knowing.”

  Bill Ragland was a duck hunter extraordinaire. The trunk of his company Ford was packed full of shells, and it is said that he never missed a shot. His understanding of waterfowl bordered on the mystical. “He could walk right into the middle of a flock of wild geese and they wouldn’t turn a hair,” said Rassy. “Daddy could outwit any bird in the world.”

  After the hunt came breakfast: apple pie and a Coke stoked with rye, with a Bromo-Seltzer chaser. More often than not, his cohort on these early morning duck hunts was Rassy—swilling whiskey and toting a gun just like her old man. “She was a great deal like Bill. The same kind of opinions,” recalls Nola Halter. “Bill was gonna shoot somebody all the time, and usually it was an American politician.” Rassy was “the closest thing to the son my father always wanted,” said daughter Toots.

  As far as rearing the children, “Daddy left all that to Mother,” Toots continues. But while Pearl might’ve been proud of the Ragland family roots, she revealed little concerning her own. “Mother was very socially conscious and I think she felt the less she said about her background, the better.” Pearl’s mother was a French immigrant, her father an Irishman who had raised horses in Kentucky. “French and Irish. An absolutely Godawful combination. That’s where all the temperament comes from. Lots of rows and tantrums. Mother and Rassy were particularly dramatic. They were birds of a feather. Spoilers.”

  What were the musical roots in the Ragland family? “None,” said Toots. “We never even sang.” Snooky disagreed. “My mother was extremely musical. She sang beautifully.” In fact, Pearl’s mother had dragged her out to sing and play piano in public.

  “Mother was so absolutely determined that no child of hers would have to go through all that, that she would not have a piano in the house,” said Snooky, adding “Rassy was like Neil—she could sit at the piano and play.” Snooky recalls Rassy telling their mother she was playing with her friend Ruth when she was actually sneaking off to the home of a widow down the street, Mrs. Robinson, to play piano. “Rassy didn’t dare tell mother she was playing piano. Mother was dead set against it. Dead set.”

  As adults, both of Rassy’s sisters would enjoy successful careers in addition to raising families—Snooky running a public relations firm in Texas, and Toots a popular columnist and radio personality in Winnipeg. If Rassy had such desires, no one knew it. A vivacious, vivid young woman—her nickname was short for Rastus, bestowed upon her for the dark hair and eyes she’d inherited from Pearl—Rassy was popular with the boys “in a sort of arm-wrestling kind of way,” said Toots. Rassy was a born athlete. She told me of w
atching her sister Snooky play tennis: “I said, ‘This isn’t so hard,’ and I immediately beat her. I played golf and skied and whatever the hell else was goin’ on. I wasn’t that good. All I wanted to do was win.”

  Most of the playing took place at the Winnipeg Canoe Club, where Rassy and her sisters apparently wreaked havoc with the opposite sex. “Boys didn’t dump the Raglands,” said Snooky. “The Ragland girls just moved on—to another boy.”

  It was at the Canoe Club in the summer of 1938 that a struggling young sportswriter from the wrong side of the tracks, enjoying a free membership provided by the club to ensure newspaper coverage of their sporting events, first encountered Rassy Ragland. Watching her yell endearments across the water to boyfriend Jack McDowell as if calling a dog for supper, Scott Young was intrigued, while women nearby cursed out loud because Rassy had stolen a boyfriend or two from all of them.

  “Rassy was very quick and very witty—you didn’t have to explain things to her twice,” said Scott. “In some cases you didn’t have to explain them at all.”

  My mother, Rassy, and her two sisters—Toots and Snooky. The Ragland girls. My grandpa was American, from Virginia—he was livin’ in our house for quite a while when I was a teenager. Pretty low-key, though—he just went to the club and back, sat and drank rye with his friends. I didn’t know him that well. He was probably on much better behavior when he was around me—his grandchildren, he’s gotta act cool. What he did at the club, I have no fuckin’ idea on earth, okay? Apparently he played a lotta cards. But they used to kinda hide me from everything. My mother … I dunno.

  Pearl was very old. They lived in an apartment, and we went there and saw them a couple of times with my dad and my brother. We’d all get dressed up. That’s one thing I remember. “What the hell am I having to get dressed up so nice …” What a head space. It’s not like, “Wow, we’re gonna go over and see Grandma and Grandpa and hang out.” No—we’re gonna get dressed up. I don’t know why my mother had to do that. I’m sure my father was much looser in the dress code.

  “Look at Scott now. Seventy-seven years old, for God’s sake and he switched to writing fiction,” mutters his longtime friend and rival Trent Frayne with begrudging admiration. “At seventy-seven, he oughtta siddown and put his feet up!”

  When I headed for Ontario to visit Scott Young in April 1995, I got the distinct impression that while he might not be putting his feet up, the intense drive of his younger days had relaxed into a much more manageable force. These days, he lives on a farm not far from Omemee, the small town where Neil spent some of the happiest days of his childhood and where, the year before, a school had been dedicated in Scott Young’s honor. Mildly annoyed that he hadn’t finished his day’s work, Young turned from his ancient computer and left his office, moving in a slow, deliberate shuffle but with a fire in his eyes that belied his age. In recalling some lost love, he cracked an expansive, lipless smile and muttered, “She was bee—yoo—tee—ful.” There was a dreamy look on his face, like a kid’s at a candy-store window. “My dad’s the coolest. He’s my hero till the end,” said Neil’s half sister, Astrid. “As old as he is, he’s the youngest guy in the world.”

  Even with the advancing years, Young remains a charismatic, handsome man. Scott’s is a craggy, authoritative face, framed by wispy gray hair and owlish eyebrows; I could imagine him as a black-robed judge deciding the fate of some reprobate and doing an eminently fair job of it, too. Scott can be prickly when it comes to ideals—he quit the Toronto Globe and Mail twice over matters of principle—but these days he seems very laidback. “My dad’s changed a whole lot,” said Astrid. “When I grew up, he was pretty conservative.”

  Scott Young speaks slowly and deliberately. Questions are carefully considered and, as with Neil, you often have to read between the lines. Compared to Rassy, who wore her heart on her sleeve, there is a lot of restraint. I couldn’t imagine the pair in the same room together, let alone married.

  “Scott’s a very warm man,” said Canadian author and television personality Pierre Berton, one of many people Scott helped get started in a career. “I like Scott—everybody likes him, y’know. I don’t think he has any enemies.”

  Most Canadians I talked to got revved up at the mere mention of Scott’s name. Folksinger Murray McLauchlan was far more excited to talk about Scott Young than Neil. “Scott is a literary cultural icon. In this country, Scott Young is every bit as famous as his kid.” McLauchlan went on to enthuse over Young’s 1952 schoolboy favorite, Scrubs on Skates: “It’s the two little savages of hockey. The archetypal work of dreams—if you’re a little kid in Shawinigan Falls dreaming of the NHL, that’s your book.” Forty years later, McLauchlan could quote word for word the book’s dedication: “To Neil and Bob, whose greatest games are still ahead of them.”

  Father and son are prolific—Neil has put out over forty albums, Scott over thirty books, including biographies, mysteries, children’s fiction and short stories. He’s worked as a television commentator and newspaper columnist, initially making a name for himself as a sportswriter covering hockey. Lately he’s been writing mysteries featuring an Inuit inspector, Matteesie Kitologitak.

  While Rassy never remarried, Scott has twice, and friends feel his marriage to writer Margaret Hogan—his constant companion since the late seventies—has settled him. During the few days I stayed with Scott, he seemed continually curious as to what his partner, off working at the time, was up to. It reminded me of Neil’s devotion to Pegi; both men had finally found mates that captivated them completely.

  Scott Young has his critics. Supporters of Rassy view his book about the family he left behind as tantamount to treason. Some see Scott as the square, uptight authority figure that Neil had to rebel against in order to survive. “Mild-mannered, never rash, a voice of reason in the quagmire of changing times … his tie is never unknotted,” wrote Juan Rodriguez in a 1972 article entitled “Neil Young’s Father.” “His feet are planted firmly on the ground. His opinions are Moderate and Sensible. He is Decent. He is a true Canadian.” The like-minded usually depict Rassy as the selfless savior who, against all odds, gave Neil the freedom to make his dreams come true. The actual story is a little more complicated than that.

  While there is no question that the collapse of his marriage to Rassy wreaked havoc in his son’s life, Scott has been a figure of inspiration to Neil. “As a writer, the one thing you have to do is lay yourself bare,” Neil recalls Scott telling him. A hell of a lesson to learn from your own father. And although its intensity has ebbed and flowed over time, the bond between father and son—much of it unspoken—remains a deep one.

  “Very similar in a lot of their outlooks” is how Astrid puts it. “My dad tends to be a little bit less serious than Neil is. He can see the humor in everything … Neil’s a little more intense.” She said both men have slow fuses that, when detonated, explode big. “My dad’s the kind of person who will let things go and let things go—he’ll kind of absorb it all in. And all of a sudden one little thing will happen, like you left the screen door open—and boom! It blows up.”

  I noticed one striking similarity between the two men. After hammering Scott with days of questions—all of which he answered without complaint—I still felt plenty lurked beneath the surface. I liked the guy, but did I get to know him? Can’t say. Scott Young seemed just as elusive as his son.

  Scott Young was born in Manitoba on April 14, 1918. His father, Percy, was a handsome, soft-spoken druggist and the son of a Methodist pioneer farmer. Mother Jean was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who demolished his church career in the twenties when he took off for the States after a comely faith healer. Percy and Jean were another volatile couple. “He and my grandmother would get together, she would get pregnant, they would yell and scream and rant and rave and they would get separated,” said granddaughter Marny Smith. Their unions resulted in three children—Scott, Bob and Dorothy—and each would have radically different childhoods as their father w
ent broke in 1926 and then (although the couple never divorced) the marriage collapsed in the midst of the Depression in 1931. Dorothy remained home with her mother; Bob went to live with missionary grandparents on an Indian reservation; Scott was farmed out to relatives in Prince Albert.

  A year later, living on relief and sharing lodging with three bachelor bank clerks, Jean reunited her children in Winnipeg. In his autobiography, Scott speaks of his mother’s relationships with her boarders and assorted others, remembering her as “very sexual and attractive to guys.” Relatives disturbed by the characterization argue that Jean did whatever was necessary to keep her children together through the Depression.

  Another of the strong women who populate both sides of Neil’s lineage, Jean Young was “a feisty old broad,” said Marny Smith. “If she wanted to come in your house and sit up on your counter and put three beers down the row, by God, that’s what she did.”

  In the late thirties, Jean would find a real home in Flin Flon, Manitoba, writing for various local papers, working as a church organist and founding a renowned music festival as well as creating Flin Flon’s first library. “She was the matriarch of the entire town,” said son Bob. Scott was the light of his mother’s life. Trent Frayne remembers visiting Jean when “all she said was, ‘Ohhh, isn’t he wonderful? Have you ever met a man who’s so wonderful?’ And I would sit there thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, he’s not that wonderful.’”

  Even as a child, Scott charmed those around him. He had a reputation as an industrious, enterprising child, earning pocket money by catching gophers and selling the tails for two cents apiece. As brother, Bob, recalls, “Scott was a miracle worker with a gopher trap.”