Wednesday, March 9, 1960 University Daily Kansan
Page 3
By Calder M. Pickett Associate Professor of Journalism
Nostalgia was a highly marketable literary quantity in the troubled fifties, and Frank Brookhouser of the Philadelphia Bulletin has assembled here some 500 pages of nostalgia. And it is not necessary to have lived through Brookhouser's "years" to enjoy the book.
THESE WERE OUR YEARS, edited by Frank Brookhouser.
Doubleday, $4.95.
The book consists of writings that Brookhouser has enjoyed—essays, newspaper columns, poetry, short stories, excerpts from novels. There is a chapter from "Dodsworth," that always underrated novel by Sinclair Lewis, with a hero that even the iconoclast from Gopher Prairie seemed to like. Sam Dodsworth, back in America after his trip to Europe, puzzled because he could remember only unimportant little details from the trip, nothing worth telling to Tub Pearson.
Now it's hard to say what constitutes our good old days. Memories tend to be golden. Brookhouser remembers the mornings of the Fourth of July, when "A boy got up earlier than usual... because there was such a big and wonderful day ahead, and there were so many important things to do." In my town, the milk factory blew its whistle at 7 o'clock, and that was the signal. No one would think of exploding a firecracker or a sidewalk torpedo before 7 o'clock.
Brookhouser includes a wonderful chapter from Robert Paul Smith's "Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing." Marbles, an old-fashioned phonograph (we used to call it the graphophone in our house), huts, and the naked ladies in the Police Gazette. He includes retrospective pieces from his favorite writer, Sherwood Anderson, about the county fair and what the small town was like in those pre-motel, pre-drive-in-movie, pre-sports car, pre-A-bomb days. And that ever-beautiful tribute to a girl of a small town, William Allen White's "Mary White."
The years encompassed in this far from definite work are the 1920s and 1930s. These are the memorable years to Frank Brookhouser. This reviewer can't recall much of the 1920s (my first news event recollection is the Lindbergh flight to Paris in 1927), but we'll go along on the 1930s, and dip into, say, the first few years of the 1940s. That's right, the forties, when World War II was going on.
Enjoyable Writings
There are sections from Dos Passos' "U.S.A."—the Unknown Soldier, Henry Ford and the tin lizzie and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and Valentino, the adagio dancer, who awakened from the ether and asked, "Well, did I behave like a pink powderpuff?"
Our Good Days
One who has lived through the age of Eisenhower might ask what is worth recalling about the desperate days of the thirties. Well, life was simpler then, and movies were more fun when they only cost a dime or the pass you received for handing out handbills ("Tarzan the Ape Man," "Silver Dollar," "When a Man's a man") all over town. You could get two cents for a gunny sack or a day-old doughnut for a pastebox; you could root through trash cans for the new commemorative stamps, or climb trees for birds' eggs, or sit under a tree and read "Tarzan and the Ant Man" or The Three Musketeers" (and not the cleaned-up version that changes Milady de Winter's profession).
This is the kind of unimportant living that "These Were Our Years" recalls. And the big news stories, too. The coming of prohibition, Ruth Etting and her gangster boy friend, the Scopes trial, Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, the Klan, Sacco and Vanzetti, Clara Bow and "it," the rise of radio, the death of Will Rogers, Bix Beiderbecke of the fabulous trumpet, Babe Ruth and Red Grange, Black Tuesday 1929, the New Deal and the folks who hated "that man in the White House," the blowing dust and the Okies, Mac-Arthur and the Bonus Army.
Unimportant Living
And there are Huey Long, Dillinger bleeding on a hot Chicago street, Walter Winchell capturing a gang leader, Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall, Fred Allen and Ted Lewis, Dizzy Dean and Lou Little, and finally that Sunday morning in 1941 when the golden years of Frank Brookhouser—and lots of other people—came to such a crashing climax.
The New Poetry
"There are reasons for the small audience that poetry commands. For we all know what poets are like. The world is too much with us, they cry, and look inward. I am untranslatable, they assert, and strike a solemn and solitary stance. For at least a century and a half the great poets have been holding the reader at arm's length while descanting on experiences in which the self that sees and the world that is seen are at odds with one another. This is a very good posture, as great poets from Shelley to Wallace Stevens have certainly demonstrated. Perhaps it is the best there is. But it has been executed so often and so successfully, and it can make a reader so uncomfortable, that some time in the next century or two we may anticipate, I think, a modest revival of light verse."
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(Excerpted from Speaking of Books by Walker Gibson, Jan. 31, 1960, New York Times Book Review.)
ANGEL FLIGHT OFFICERS — Angel Flight Officers, who have been chosen by Arnold Air Society and Air Force ROTC, will head an honorary social service organization for upperclass University of Kansas women. The officers chosen are, left to right: Leslie Roach, Topeka junior, executive officer; Kathleen McCarthy, Kansas City, Mo., sophomore, publicity officer; Carolyn Throop, Kansas City, Mo., sophomore, administrative officer; Barbara Bach, Kansas City, Mo., junior, commander; and Janice Guyot, Arkansas City sophomore, comptroller.
Air Force Groups Plan Women's Angel Flight
Angel Flight, an honorary social service organization for sophomore, junior and senior women, will be formed at the University of Kansas.
Arnold Air Society, undergraduate Air Force association, and the Air Force ROTC will sponsor the organization. Maj. Elery Watson, assistant professor of air science, will be the adviser for Angel Flight.
Twenty girls will be chosen as members of the organization. Two nominations from each women's organized house are to be submitted to the Air Force ROTC office by March 28. Letters and application blanks will be received by the houses later this week.
After the nominations are received, there will be a rush tea for the candidates and the 20 members will be chosen.
Applicants for Angel Flight will be judged on interest, scholarship, attractiveness and personality. Members of Arnold Air Society and Angel Flight officers who have already been chosen will be at the
OLATHE—(UPI) — Sentences of seven years in the Kansas reformatory at Hutchinson were ordered yesterday for Howard Glen Wagoner, 18. Warsaw, Mo., and James Phillip Childress, 16. Kansas City, Mo., in connection with assault and robbery of a Merriam, Kan., couple.
Two Men Sentenced
tea to judge the prospective candidates.
Ellis Hitt, Wellington senior, Clif Cushman, Grand Forks, N.D., senior, and Dale McKemey, Downs junior, members of Arnold Air Society, appointed the five Angel Flight officers. The girls were chosen because they have shown interest in forming an Angel Flight organization for KU women.
They are:
Barbara Bach, Kansas City, Mo,
junior, commander; Leslie Roach,
Topeka junior, executive officer;
Carolyn Throop, Kansas City, Mo.
sophomore, administrative officer;
Janice Guyot, Arkansas City, sophomore,
competroller, and Kathleen
McCarthy, Kansas City, Mo., sophomore,
publicity officer.
The purpose of Angel Flight is to enable KU women to learn about the Air Force and promote the Air Force ROTC. The girls will act as hostesses for Air Force functions. For example, when visiting officials of the Air Force are at KU, the girls will be hostesses at these functions.
After Angel Flight is organized, singing groups, dance groups and a drill team may be formed within the organization.
Many universities and colleges have active Angel Flight societies on their campuses. KU's Angel Flight will be affiliated with the national organization at San Diego State College in California.
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