“I know this Time bit so well, man,” he said.
We thought it a little windy for a Time lead but we didn’t want to split hairs so we let it ride.
About that time three small T-shirted boys, 10 or 11, came rustling up through the woods, single file.
“We’re surrounded,” said New York Post, throwing up his hands in mock terror. “They’re sending a midget army through the woods!”
When the boys emerged on the street a policeman told them they would have to leave.
As they filed out again, a reporter said to the last one, “You should have got you a press card, man.”
Later in the day a Chicago Tribune reporter came up to the redoubtable Dr. Benjamin Fine [the education reporter for the New York Times who had become well known during the 1957 crisis—Ed.] and said, “Well look who’s here. I thought you were safely ensconced in some college campus.”
Dr. Fine explained that he was still a dean at Yeshiva University at Manhattan but that he also was writing a weekly education column for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
“I’m sort of ambivalent right now,” he said, dean fashion.
About the middle of the day, some confusion set in as to where to go. We heard the Chicago Sun-Times man talking to Chicago on the phone:
“It’s happening in too many places,” he said. “You’ll have to get somebody on rewrite to get the wire copy for the bones of the story because I’m going to have to be filled in.”
It was a busy day for the press.
August 20, 1959
Remember?
Downtown the other day we saw a mother give her little girl what is sometimes called a good shaking and heard her say, “If you don’t stop acting ugly I’m going to take you back to the car and wear you out.”
We had not heard these expressions, “acting ugly,” and “wear you out,” in a long time, and it set us to thinking about Southernisms.
In a similar situation, we thought, the mother could have said, “When we get home I’m going to cut me a keen switch and stripe your legs good.”
We thought of those two good adjectives, “tacky” and “ratty” that are being largely ignored these days.
“No, you’re not going to wear that old tacky Captain Marvel T-shirt again today.”
“Well, if you’d ever get up out of that ratty old chair long enough, I might get it fixed.”
We thought of “cream” for ice cream and “wheel” for “bicycle.”
“This is mighty good cream.”
“Boy, hop on your wheel and go get me a can of Granger.”
* * *
Then we thought of “shug” for “sugar” and “hun” for “honey,” terms of endearment we are going to put back into action next chance we get.
This brought to mind “sugar” meaning hugs and kisses, which in turn took us back to the family reunion where a lot of this goes on.
“You better get on over here, Hun, and give yo’ Aunt Dolly some sugar, ’cause if you don’t I know somebody that will.”
So you would march over and submit to a good wetting down, eyes, ears, nose, all over. “mmmmmmmMMMMMMMuh,” she would say. “I think I’ll just take you home with me.”
And more often than not, the ones who were the craziest about sugar were the ones who looked like aging toad frogs. But they were invariably the nicest ones, these affectionate ones.
How much more welcome were they than the uncle who enjoyed running his knuckles up the nape of your bristly neck, a trick which would make your eyes smart and which had something to do with a horse eating corn.
Then he might grab your foot and bend it back and say, “I can’t let go till you say calf rope.”
“Calf rope! Calf rope!”
But he wouldn’t let go till he got ready. “What’s that? I can’t hear you. Snapping turtles don’t let go till it thunders.”
Later on, after he had nipped off your nose and thrown it away a couple of times, he would make an enclosure with his hands, and entice you to stick a finger in an opening he had provided.
When you did it he would drive his thumbnail into your finger and laugh. This had to do with a turkey or a banty rooster in a cage. He had an inexhaustible supply of these barnyard gags.
* * *
There were Presbyterians, Methodists and a sprinkling of Baptists at these get-togethers we attended, and when it came time to eat the honor of returning thanks usually fell to the windiest old man there.
He would send a long, thunderous blessing rambling up to the skies, and you would have thought that we had all just been delivered from the fiery furnace, instead of sitting down to eat some sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows on top.
After dinner the older men would sit on the porch and talk about church government and church politics and split doctrinal hairs, and one of them would tell about someone’s daughter who had married a Catholic boy. Heads would shake.
Someone once said of the Germans and their love for theology that if they had a choice between Heaven and lectures on Heaven they would take the lectures every time.
That’s the way we remember those old men: they would rather talk about it than go.
If you want to hear Southerners talk, and watch them, attend a gathering of a whole family of them. They’re at their most Southern there where the conditions are optimum. And you can learn a right smart if you listen.
August 21, 1959
Scribe Scrubs
An Abilene, Tex., high school coach by the name of Chuck Moser was quoted by Jim Bailey in a Gazette article last week as saying:
“And kick off your bums—or rinky dinks or whatever you call them—in the springtime. Every squad has boys it shouldn’t have. See if you can move these boys toward the school newspaper, the track team, or the basketball statistician’s job. When you cut them in the middle of football season, it’s a bad thing. They have friends on the squad. It hurts morale.”
Moser, who has won 74 of 79 games in six years at Abilene, passed on this tip at the Arkansas High School Coaches Association clinic held at Our Town.
We stand in awe of Coach Moser’s win record and we admire his Durocher-style candor, but his dismissal of the school newspaper as a harmless form of time-killing for rinky dinks strikes us as being a little cavalier.
We can see one of the rinky dinks now, a sullen lad with his pants at half mast on his behind, approaching the journalism instructor, a groveling Bob Cratchit sort of fellow.
“I come over from the practice field to see about knocking out a few editorials for you, Jack. Coach Moser said I didn’t pack the gear to play on his team and he sent me over here to see you. What it is, I’m stupid and yellow and bad for morale.”
“Glad to see you. You’ll fit in fine here on the Eagle staff. Always happy to get one of Coach’s culls. I only wish we could get more of the crumbs and scraps from the athletic table. It seems that this year all the bums are ignoring us for the band and the track team and the statisticians’ jobs.”
“Yeah. Well, I think I’d like to be editor, Dad.”
“Good. Here, try on this green eyeshade and these sleeve protectors. Sometimes we lose our perspective and forget that the main thing we want to do here at A.H.S. is stay out of Chuck’s hair so he can keep rolling up those victories. That’s why we have all these peripheral activities like classes and the paper. The way I like to look at it is that we’re all on the same team, and I like to think that back here behind the lines, so to speak, we are just as important in our way as our boys up there toting that spheroid. That’s the way I like to look at it.
“Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got to run over to the gym and pick up Chuck’s laundry. He’s particular about his sweat socks and won’t let anyone else on the faculty touch them. Just find you a typewriter anywhere and make yourself at home.”
“Okay. I think I’ll write a little something about school spirit.”
“Great.”
In the past, we have often been puzzled by Texas journal
ism. Not any more.
August 25, 1959
Dixieishness
We have a letter from a Little Rock man, a former Mississippian, with some comment on the remarks we made the other day on Southern expressions.
“Now, if you really need some material on Southern expressions, go down in Mississippi and attend a family reunion. Folks here in Arkansas are not quite as Southern as us folks down in Mississippi.
“For example: We say ‘red bugs,’ they say ‘chiggers.’ We say ‘butter-beans,’ they say ‘lima beans.’”
Just about the last thing we want to be drawn into is defending Arkansas against Mississippi in a Southernness tournament. Still, you had better come up with something more substantial than red bugs and butter beans, Mr. Former Mississippian, if you want to defend your proposition.
When we last heard, they had not changed the name of the ball teams down at Fordyce to the Chiggers, and we never heard anybody south of the Arkansas River say “lima beans” for “butterbeans.”
We know a man in South Arkansas who says “Pass those molasses” and “These sure are good cheese.” You get much more Southern than that and you can’t stand it, friend. Get past that point and you’re not Southern anymore, you’re sick.
February 3, 1960
Rare Specimen
Francis Irby Gwaltney, a commuter to Our Town from Conway and a rare specimen, an Arkansas novelist, said yesterday that he hopes to have the political novel he is working on completed and in the bookstores by November when the elections might help sales.
(“Rare” is a judicious bluff here meaning that we don’t know how many novelists there are in the state. We know of only one other, Wesley Ford Davis at the University. If there are others we’d like to know.)
The novel deals with contemporary Southern politics. “But I hasten to add,” Gwaltney said, smiling, “that it is not laid in Arkansas.”
Just what state it is may prove puzzling though, he said, since it is surrounded by Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana. “No, I never get around to giving it a name,” he said.
Gwaltney is active executive secretary of the State History Commission—the state historian—with offices at the Old State House. When he’s off duty he writes and he has four published novels to his credit.
Gwaltney’s South is the changing South and Arkansas is a good vantage point to watch it from, he believes. “Things are boiling here,” he said.
As for the supply of subject matter, he said he has enough novels in his head now to last him three lifetimes.
* * *
We asked about this business of breaking new ground, that is, of starting in writing about a people, a state, with almost no literary traditions. Any difficulty there?
“Well, my editor in New York sometimes questions my dialogue,” Gwaltney said. “About the only South he knows is the literary South and I don’t follow the line laid down by Faulkner and Caldwell. It’s hard to convince him sometimes about things. My characters preach too much, he says. Well, that may be. But whatever weaknesses I have I do know how the people in Arkansas talk.”
We asked him if he had any ideas on why a state like Mississippi, right next door, had produced so many fine writers and Arkansas so few.
“It’s only a theory, and I guess a kind of left-handed compliment to Arkansas, but I think unhappiness probably has a lot to do with it,” he said. “Same thing with Georgia. Unhappiness tends to produce writers, I think, and if you’ve ever traveled in those states maybe you’ve noticed that—I don’t know—somber-chilling atmosphere. We’ve always been pretty happy here in Arkansas. I might say that I don’t think unhappiness has been the motivating thing to me.”
He shrugged. “It’s just a theory, anyway.”
* * *
Does he correspond or exchange ideas in any way with other Southern writers?
“Not if I can help it,” he said. “There’s no way in the world one writer can help another writer. That attitude has got me into a little trouble locally with writing groups. ‘Gwaltney has staked out Arkansas as his personal domain,’ they say. I don’t know what they mean by ‘staked out.’ It’s there for everybody.”
We asked about Norman Mailer who served with Gwaltney in the same Army unit in the Pacific in World War II.
“We were once close friends,” he said, “but we had an argument. I do say that I think Norman is one of the very finest novelists in America today. And that’s covering a lot of ground.”
Gwaltney’s growing success seems to be reflected pretty well in the sales of his books. His first novel, “The Yeller-Headed Summer,” sold 1,900 hard back copies and about 50,000 paperback; “The Day the Century Ended,” 19,000 hardback and more than a million paperback; “A Moment of Warmth,” 27,000 hardback and about 750,000 paperback, and “The Numbers of Our Days,” which sold 29,000 hardback copies, is now going into print between paper covers.
* * *
Europe, Gwaltney said, is one of the best markets for his books, particularly England, Germany and the Scandinavian countries.
After his last novel was translated into Dutch, he said, the publisher over there wanted to change his name to “Franz Irby” because “Gwaltney” was so hard for them to pronounce. (It’s pronounced “Galtney” here.) Gwaltney said he told him okay, on the condition that he get Queen Juliana to change the name of one of her unpronounceable daughters at the same time.
“That was kind of smart-alecky, I guess,” he said.
His new novel is called “A Step in the River,” a phrase he lifted from a sermon by his Methodist minister at Conway.
“I’ve forgotten the exact circumstances, but it was about taking one step in the river, the Jordan River. I wrote it down on the back of a church bulletin when I heard it.”
New York Herald Tribune 1960–1964
General Assignment
Early on at the Herald Tribune, Portis demonstrated his versatility as a writer, excelling at the gimlet-eyed story on city eccentrics, the humorous first-person piece, and breaking-news reportage.
November 24, 1960
Court Rules: Lion Is a Wild Animal
A young Brooklyn longshoreman fought a spirited but losing battle in a Brooklyn courtroom yesterday for the right to keep a pet lion at his home.
After the drawn-out, somewhat tongue-in-cheek proceedings at Flatbush Magistrate’s Court, Magistrate Matthew P. Fagan resolved the issue with a concise decision: “I take judicial notice that the lion is a wild animal. I find the defendant guilty.”
The sentence was a $25 fine or ten days in jail. Anthony Ortolano, twenty-six, of 581 Carroll St., Brooklyn, the defendant, asked for ten days in which to raise the $25 and the magistrate granted the request, noting that Mr. Ortolano’s care of the lion had been exemplary.
The specific charge was Section 197 of the city’s Penal Law which makes harboring a wild animal capable of inflicting bodily harm a misdemeanor.
Mr. Ortolano’s troubles with the law began Friday night when Patrolman Thomas Higgins and another officer stopped a car at Union St. and Seventh Ave. to check on the automobile registration. In the car were Mr. Ortolano, three other men and Cleo, a four-month-old male lion, three and a half feet tall and weighing 125 pounds. Mr. Ortolano has since corrected the name to Leo in light of the discovery made over the weekend.
Leo and Mr. Ortolano were hustled off to the Bergan St. police station, where they cooled their heels while a summons was issued. Leo was taken to the Brooklyn shelter of the American Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The trial began yesterday with Mr. Ortolano’s attorney, William Kunstler of Manhattan, asking the judge if the lion could be brought in the courtroom as evidence that he was friendly and tame.
“Oh hell no,” said Magistrate Fagan. “All these people in here would start running. And I wouldn’t blame them.” About 150 persons were in the room.
Then he turned to some officers and asked if they had the
ir guns ready. “Don’t bring him in under any circumstances,” said the judge, “I will conduct this case outside.”
The judge, attorneys, witnesses, defendant and newsmen repaired to an alley outside the court where Leo had been brought in an ASPCA panel truck. The flap was let down to expose the lion, which was beating his head against the wire netting.
The judge opened court in the alley and read the complaint. Mr. Ortolano allowed Leo to lick his fingers through the cage. Then a noisy group of students from nearby Erasmus Hall High School joined the spectators and Magistrate Fagan decided to take the trial back inside. “I’ll take judicial note that I’ve seen the lion,” he said.
The testimony of witnesses followed.
Patrolman Higgins told of the Friday night arrest. He said that Ortolano had told the police that he had bought the lion two weeks ago for $350 from an animal dealer.
Mr. Ortolano said he had a leash on the lion at the time of the arrest and that the windows of the car were up. He said he had a steel cage for Leo in the backyard at his home.
To prove that the animal was tame, said Mr. Kunstler, he would call as witnesses two animal experts.
The first was Mrs. Helen Martini, of 1026 Old Kingsbridge Road, the Bronx, who said she had been an animal trainer for twenty years. Leo was not ferocious, but “very nervous,” she said. But when she was cross-examined by Irving Singer, Assistant District Attorney, she conceded that the animal belonged in a zoo.
Next came Bob Dietc, a zoo-keeper at Fairlawn, N.J., who said that he had trained Leo himself and that he was safe. “He’s only a baby, you could put him in your vest pocket,” he said.
Asked if it wasn’t true that the animal was unpredictable, Mr. Dietc said, “It’s my opinion that all animals are unpredictable, from chickens to birds.”
After the holidays the ASPCA will turn Leo over to Mr. Dietc who will keep him until he can sell him for Mr. Ortolano. Mr. Ortolano, who has been paying $3.15 a day for horsemeat for Leo, is busy getting together $25.
January 16, 1962
2 Men—1,700 Women, Peace Train to Capital
WASHINGTON