|
|
|
Making Middletown
STAUGHTON LYND
| |
|
My Parents | |
| We are told in the introduction to Middletown that "two streams of colonists" met in the Midwest: "the Yankees from New England and New York," and the "southern stream" who, "having passed through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, went down the Ohio River."1 My parents exemplified the two kinds of colonists. |
1
|
|
My mother Helen Merrell Lynd came from a libertarian New England background suggested by the blue sky, evergreens, and granite rock of that part of the world. A Merrell, she once told me, had fought in the American Revolution. As the Merrells moved west they founded colleges: Ripon College in Wisconsin, and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, attended by the future Justice of the United States Supreme Court, William Douglas. My mother's mother, my maternal grandmother, was a small and unassuming woman who taught school in Illinois. But my grandmother refused to lead her students in saluting the flag, because, she said, it isn't true that there is justice for all.2 |
2
|
|
My father was quite different. His people were from the upper South. My dad was his own unique combination of a former student at Union Theological Seminary and a believer in central planning in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt Republicans and the New Deal. |
3
|
|
It seems that between the first and second years at Union, students were expected to volunteer for summer preaching assignments.3 Somehow my father wound up at a Rockefeller oil camp in Elk Basin, Wyoming, where he arrived by stagecoach. He located a boarding house, but at dinner the first evening he sensed a chill around the table. He concluded that men who worked six days a week for Mr. Rockefeller were not excited about a handsome young man from the East spending his days visiting their wives. |
4
|
So my father got a job as a pick and shovel laborer, and preached in the school house Sunday nights. It is the single thing about him of which I am most proud. When I was growing up stories were told. One was about the man who stood at the school house door as the hat was passed for the collection and shouted, "Lucky to get the hat back!" And songs were sung, especially a song that I have never heard elsewhere which begins:
When the Good Lord made the copper ore
He said, "I'll put you away to store
Where man won't find you any more
Unless he's a human mole."
But he reckoned without the miner man,
Who isn't built on the regular plan,
So ever since the world began
It's the miner who digs the hole.
Chorus:
Colonel, another bowl!
My throat's as black as coal
But if you listen well,
You can hear me tell,
If there's mines up in Heaven
I'm a-going to Hell,
I'm a poor old busted son of a gun
The miner that digs the hole.
|
5
|
|
When I was a teenager, I thought I saw a momentary reappearance of the pick and shovel laborer of the early 1920s when my father was invited to address a UAW educational conference in 1949. The speech was printed as a pamphlet because, according to Victor Reuther's preface, "reports of it have circulated through the union with the result that there has been an insistent demand for its publication."4 I remember my father's face as he came in the door of our family apartment after giving that speech. I had never seen him so happy. |
. . . |
There are about 3839 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
