The Feedsack Dress

Ending an educational era

In my one-room rural school, doing research meant going to The World Book, a set of encyclopedias that contained a little bit about almost everything. My teacher sent me there, for example, when I argued that a whale couldn’t be a mammal because it was a fish.

In junior and senior high school, my first stop for research became the much heavier and harder to comprehend Encyclopaedia Britannica. I continued to rely on it as a starting place in college and thereafter.

For many years an old set of the books occupied a bookshelf in the hall outside my home office. When I moved back to Missouri in 2007, I had to cull many of the books collected during and since college. A high percentage went to good homes, but friends, libraries, and thrift stores (and my own common sense) told me several hundred were so outdated as to be useless.

Discarding any book distresses me, but nothing hurt so much as putting my 30-year-old Brittanica in the trash.

This week that wound reopened. Encyclopaedia Britanica, Inc., will no longer issue print editions. This marvelous source will no longer occupy a place of honor on classroom shelves. If you don’t have computer access, your questions go unanswered.

Like most students and adults, I now do most of my preliminary research online, but the Web doesn’t inspire trust the way that set of heavy tomes does. You can’t trust and you must verify what you find online.

A constantly updated (in theory) Britannica remains available online, for a price. It’s not the same. I loved the print edition not just because I found answers there but because I stumbled across wonderful unknown facts on adjoining pages. For me as a student, it opened a vast, fascinating world.

The death of the print edition marks the end of an educational era.

—Carolyn Mulford

Reading under and in the trees

Summer meant lots of work on the farm, but it also offered time to read, especially if I took my book beyond the sound of my mother’s call and out of sight of my little sister. 

When I didn’t have much time, I’d sprawl on an old blanket under a maple tree in our front yard. If I had a couple hours free, I’d sneak away from the house into the pasture and lean against a huge elm tree. Usually the dog would lead my pesky little sister to me.

I found a better hiding place in a cottonwood tree bya clear running stream too small to be called a creek (pronounced crick). I could climb up a few feet and wedge myself between the branches. I wasn’t visible unless someone stood right below me and looked up.

Many of the small library’s books were classics or simply old. Fortunately I loved historical novels. Here are some of the authors and titles I remember.

R. D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone   (I reread this 600-page book before a trip to England a few years ago and marveled that I’d read the whole thing at 13 or 14)

Pearl Buck: The Good Earth   (on my list to reread)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Last Days of Pompei   (good story, ponderous writing)

Willa Cather: O Pioneers, My Antonia, The Song of the Lark   (still worth reading) 

Winston Churchill: Richard Carvell, The Crisis    (huge in his day; forgotten now)

James Fennimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans     (clunky writing, intriguing content)

Alfred Leland Crabb:  A Mockingbird Sang at Chickamauga    (riveting then)

Charles Dana: Two Years Before the Mast    (goes well with Moby Dick)

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist   (Dickens will live forever)

Lloyd C. Douglas: The Robe, Magnificent Obsession, The Big Fisherman   (wildly popular at one time but mostly forgotten)

Edna Ferber: So Big       (better for an adult than an adolescent)

Zane Grey: Riders of the Purple Sage    (one of many fast-paced tales)

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter   (read mostly in lit classes today)

Herman Melville: Moby Dick     (everyone knows the whale, few read the classic)

Margaret Mitchell: Gone With the Wind      (a category in itself)

Kenneth Roberts: Northwest Passage     (strong historical narrative)

Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped, Treasure Island   (classics)

William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair       (neglected classic)

Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi  (I’ve never stopped reading Twain)

Lew Wallace: Ben-Hur    (heavy going today; you need to like history a lot)

Owen Wister: The Virginian      (period piece but timeless characters)

Harold Bell Wright: The Shepherd of the Hills, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (dated writing but interesting portrait of a time and place—the Ozarks)

I never enjoyed books more than when I read them in the shade of a tree.

—Carolyn Mulford

 

Visiting a book's setting

Books give us images that last a lifetime. I recently visited the setting of one of my favorite childhood novels, The Shepherd of the Hills. It’s an unlikely romantic tale set in the Ozarks in the early 1900s.

The book has drawn tourists to the area from 1907 until today. It has attracted moviemakers, too. The 1941 version of the film, which I saw on television decades later, starred John Wayne.

To a feedsack kid living on a farm in northeast Missouri, the state’s once isolated southwest corner seemed an exotic and exciting place. Years later I spent a few days in the area enjoying its beautiful springs, clear streams, and rugged hills (really ancient mountains). I also stayed overnight in Branson to see an outdoor performance of The Shepherd of the Hills staged at a homestead described in Harold Bell Wright’s novel.

Recently I went back to Branson, a town of 6,000 that has become the live performance capital of the world. I didn’t go to attend the 100 or so different shows that bring in millions of visitors each year. I went for a five-day workshop on Ozark culture—to learn more about the people and places I read about so many years ago. The story drew some of the others who came from 13 states.

I learned, among many things, that the hill people lived a harder and more isolated life than we did in agriculturally rich northeast Missouri, but many came from the same roots. They have a bit more of the border-state drawl than the people with whom I grew up, but the dialect of Wright’s memorable characters appears to have yielded to the influence of national radio and television.

Branson is possum ugly, with countless motels, restaurants, souvenir places, and theaters clinging to denuded and damaged hills along the car-clogged Strip. A few miles away, the land remains largely unchanged, and hard-working people still gather on Saturday nights to play the old songs for each other. It’s pretty close to fiddler heaven.

I took The Shepherd of the Hills and read it in the evenings after the workshops. I liked the plot a lot better when I was a kid, but the portrait of the community still carried me through.

—Carolyn Mulford

Reading Mark Twain

This year marks the 175th anniversary of the birth and the 100th anniversary of the death of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known throughout the world as Mark Twain. 

We’ll be reading his books in print and whatever comes after the iPad as long as people can read. If we’re lucky, we’ll be reading them as children, young adults, and mature thinkers. He’s one of those rare writers who delights blossoming readers with his humor, college intellectuals with his satire, and wise ones with his insights. 

I first met Mark Twain in the first grade. Every day after lunch the teacher, Miss Hayes, read a chapter of Tom Sawyer to the pupils of New Hope School. Tom’s crazy doings made us laugh, and we wondered what was coming next. It was by far the best part of the school day. Later Miss Hayes read Huckleberry Finn to us. I didn’t enjoy it as much. I laughed at lots of it, but the parts where the escaped slave was in danger scared me. I couldn’t understand slavery and why some people were so mean. 

A few years later I read the books for myself. I still preferred Tom Sawyer. In college, one of my American literature classes studied Huckleberry Finn. Strange how much it had improved over the years. A decade or two later I read it again and realized it’s one of the greatest books in American literature. 

Since then I’ve read almost everything Twain wrote. Some of his writing is dated, of course, and occasionally his later satire turns sour. He was a writer of his time, but also a writer for all time. Many of his comments on Congress would work quite well on John Stewart’s The Daily Show. 

Twain showed the same insight into human nature that William Shakespeare did. Their writing and their lives differ tremendously, but they both earned immortality with their words.

 —Carolyn Mulford

Choosing books from different states

When I was a child, my family never traveled anywhere you couldn't reach between the morning and evening milking. I learned about other places from books.

You can find a list of recommended children's books from the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands at www.loc.gov/bookfest/2009/toolkit/educators/greatreads.html#mo. Click on a state on the map or scroll down through the list of states and books below the map.

Last summer each state's Center for the Book selected a book as its recommended read at the 2009 National Book Festival. The national Center for the Book at the Library of Congress constructed the map, "52 Great Reads About Great Places." 

Click on Missouri and up comes The Feedsack Dress.

—Carolyn Mulford