But Wait -- There’s More!

Sometimes the trip you plan isn’t the trip you get

Ten days ago I went back to St Louis on the spur of the moment for a 36-hour stay. Blasted into town for a family meeting that I very much wanted to attend. It went well and I learned a lot. Next morning I drove my rental car to the airport and checked in for the first leg of my return trip to Grand Rapids. I watched my suitcase disappear on the conveyer belt, leaving me with a tote containing a stack of heavy files, my night guards (yes, plural), my electronics and a comb.

Down to Concourse C and my gate... and there the fun began. I saw that my flight was delayed by a half hour because a severe storm system in the upper Midwest. There would be no chance of making my tight connection at O'Hare. The few remaining alternatives were sold out, seats bought up by frantic travelers in my exact predicament, who just happened to get to their airports a tad earlier than I did. However, that suitcase I watched disappear? That made it on the eventual flight just fine and onward to Grand Rapids.

Well, okay. Here's what I can do, thought I. Exchange my tickets for new flights in the morning, book a room at the convenient Airport 'Horton'  for the night, take their shuttle, which I knew to be reliable, back over to Lambert early tomorrow and be on my way home. Inconvenient but no sweat. I scored a toothbrush and toothpaste at the front desk, lulled myself with stupid TV and slept poorly.

   Next morning I got out of St. Louis as planned, landing at a beleaguered O'Hare. This monster storm, which I never did see, was still making kamikaze hits across the Great Lakes, effectively dorking airline schedules everywhere for the second day running. Well, no matter. This time I'd been smart, choosing a connecting flight due to take off  a couple hours after my first flight landed.

That was all well and good until I actually trudged off the O’Hare jetway and discovered said flight had been canceled. I managed to get on an alternative flight; it, too, was axed. My phone and tablet were running out of juice. So was I, having lugged my heavy totebag up and down the lengths of O'Hare concourses H, J and K -- which you may know is quite some distance. My only option now: the last flight out to GR, arrival time 11 pm, on which I occupied the waiting list #20 slot. Risky in the extreme.

No way was I going to spend another night in a hotel or in the terminal. Chicago was just three hours from home by interstate. So I found my way back up concourse  G or H or wherever the hell I was at that point, down into the bowels of O'Hare, and after a very long trek guided by red arrows painted on the floor (in a surreal nod to The Wizard of Oz), into the waiting room for regional bus connections. I bought a ticket, no muss no fuss, to Michigan City, Indiana. I rode for a peaceful two hours in a cushy, commodious seat, as the grappling hooks in my neck and shoulder muscles loosened their grip. Not once did I hear a Barbie voice bleating over a scratchy microphone, reminding me to keep my seat belt fastened (“We DO ask…”) or a weary pilot reporting further delays at the next stop.

My dearest hero husband met me at Michigan City and drove me 90 minutes back up the Michigan coast, chasing a spectacular Big Lake sunset all the way. Then...I was home and it was over.

   Except it wasn't. Several days later I began scratching the angry red bites that had broken out over my body -- shoulders, back, ankles, Wherever. Funny, I hadn't been outdoors. The oddest bites were inflicted in two precise lines like Busby Berkeley chorines, time-stepping a perfect Art Deco chevron across my right shoulder. What makes a mark like that? Where had I seen this before? On the internet... on WebMD?

Five...six...seven...eight... ONE....overnight sensation!

    Oh, no. Oh, the horror.

   Bedbugs!  I had been ravaged by bedbugs, maybe on the bus, but way more likely in the Airport Horton. It's a favorite stopover of flight crews, whose peripatetic luggage is the perfect vehicle for these parasites.

    Everything about my experience fit the bedbug profile. And let me just say, reading about the habits of the loathsome little creatures is nightmare material. Let me also say that their bites itch like crazy.

By now the itch has subsided, though my unwelcome tattoo job remains. It will fade, though my new resolve will not. Another meeting in St. Louis? Probably, and I'll happily attend. But you can bet I'll be driving.

       ###

The View From Ford Country

A Wildly Unscientific Election Year Observation

By an Admitted Outsider

My observation is this: in Holland, Michigan, the Lake Michigan beach town where I live six months every year, there are almost no front-yard presidential campaign signs. I find this remarkable.

Why? Because usually at this time in an election year, signs would have popped up like the town’s famous tulips, and a majority would be for Republican candidates. Holland is in the heart of uber-Republican southwestern Michigan. Nearby Grand Rapids was the hometown of 38th president Gerald R. Ford, who actually spent summer holidays about five miles down the road from me in a modest beach community. It’s the base that sent him to the House of Representatives in 1948, and the home of his presidential library.

Holland, 30 miles to the southwest, was settled in 1847 by a band of Dutch Calvinist immigrants, whose piety was too severe for the liking of their counterparts in The Netherlands. Here in their New World settlement, they could escape the poverty of the old country and enjoy the freedom to practice religion the way they wanted. At some point a schism occurred, spawning a reformed Reformed congregation, the Protestant Reformed Church. I’m told that newcomers to Holland, down to this day, are routinely asked upon first meeting: “What church do you go to?” although this has never happened to me.

___________________

"Where are the signs ?"          __________________________     

Holland remained an ethnocentric enclave until the mid-twentieth century, when Mexican migrant workers here to pick summer blueberries began staying over and putting down roots.  Later they were followed by a significant Vietnamese population. The groups intermingle at work, in schools and political office; it’s a common thing these days to meet a Brian Gutierrez or a Rosario Vandenberg. Yet despite the deepening skin tones of Holland, Michigan, its overall ethic remains: church, family, very hard work, tight with a penny. Fierce independence: no government aid, thank you, we’ll fund this ourselves.

    This is an area that in 2014 sent tea-partier Cindy Gamrat to the Michigan state house. (If you’re in need of diversion some day, Google her name to see how that worked out.)

   In Holland’s Park Township, where I live, eight candidates filed for seven open positions on the board of trustees. Of these, all but one were Republicans. Their campaign signs were all over the place. So where are the signs now? Specifically, the Trump signs? Where is the easy public political jawing, pre-Republican convention, that we heard routinely at the retired folks’ gym we frequent? Now, nada. Everyone’s lips are zipped.

  To date, I’ve seen eight Hillary signs in the areas of Holland I frequent--one less than a block from my house--and none for Trump.

   That’s the view from this corner of Ford country. I take no position on the implications, though I find them a distinct curiosity.  The journalist in me loves curiosities and loves even more to pass them along. So, this is what election year 2016 looks like in one formerly predictable corner of the nation. What it actually means...we’ll have to wait for election returns to find out .

                                                        ###

How about your vicinity? Behaving predictably or otherwise? If you’d like to share some observations, please record them here in the Comments section, and please include your location(I know that some readers have had difficulty with comments. It has to do with a quirk of Blogger, my host. I’m sorry.) BTW, I’m more interested in the behavior of your local constituency than in your political views. But, free speech and all that, you know.

###

COMMENTS

A friend from Holland: Trump supporters may not be posting signs because of fear caused by violence during Trump rallies.

Another friend from Holland: My in-laws are very Republican and they have been pretty quiet about the whole thing! (My kids were big Bernie fans.) I haven't seen any presidential signs. I think too early, but also a lot less this year. I don't think people want to put their neck (reputation) out for Trump like they would for a non-controversial Republican.

BAJ, St. Louis neighbor: We are not seeing many, if any, signs yet around here.

ODB, formerly of Ann Arbor, now Seattle: My belief is that (a) people who vote will largely be voting against someone rather than for someone and (b) many stalwart supporters of Clinton or Trump would prefer not to be identified with the candidate (i.e., to preserve deniability) so they are not posting yard signs. Total speculation on my part, but consistent with my disenchantment with what our political system has been able to put forward by way of individuals with stature and integrity.  Politicians and voters alike are not looking much beyond the next 6-12 months.  They see the train-wreck a'comin' and they are focused on self-preservation. That sort of focus precludes any useful thought about solving persistent economic and social problems.  

  Just watched an interesting 1995 movie about Jesse James and his brother, Frank, in post-Civil War Missouri.  Jesse was taken-out by a Pinkerton hireling (named "Ford" incidentally) and Frank was captured, put on trial for murder, and acquitted by juries three times. Perhaps we have found our way back to the Wild West.  No yard signs for Robin Hood, but a lot of sentiment for radical change.  Yet another "most critical election of our lifetime."

CJC of Louisville: Louisville is mostly Democrat, the rest of Kentucky is Red State all the way.

 

GETTING MY KICKS

Mooring-bound on The Mother Road

The best thing that ever happened to Route 66 was that it died.

In 1985 the Mother Road was banished from the roster of U.S. highways. It was still there, but the government no longer acknowledged its existence. That effectively killed Route 66, but it also unexpectedly revived people's interest in it. Route 66 has flourished in its afterlife, a luxury usually only enjoyed by gods and zombies.
[author unknown, but a good one]

- See more at: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/14537#sthash.yUKa8Y4r.dpuf

There have always been a number of routes, all blue highways, to carry you northeast from St Louis to the Michigan state line. But until the early 1970s there was only one expressway, The Mother Road, and her name was Route 66.

Today you can use a combination of several interstates to whisk you through the endless expanse of Illinois cornfields. "Whisk " being a relative term. But for me, the favored route has always been and always will be The Mother Road. Combined occasionally with her bastard son, Interstate 55.

My association with 66 predates memory, for this was the route my father used to get us to Odell, Illinois, the tiny community that was home to his beloved family farm and the nearby ancestral house "in town."

It was a trip that loomed inescapably en route either to or from any other more interesting destination. You want to see Lake Michigan? Odell is right on the way. Boston? Ditto. Only the year we went to Yellowstone did we elude Odell, but I’m certain we made up for it later.

Imprisoned in the scratchy backseat of my father's army green '53 Buick, I became all too familiar with the landmarks of Route 66. Between St Louis and Springfield, a grain elevator perched right on the road side. To the north, a long stretch of telephone poles, leaning at angles -- a prairie Golgotha that ran for miles until we reached an old barn-made-billboard by the addition of a Meramec Caverns stencil.

cricket hackmann photo

I did love the billboards. They promised a high life that my family would never take part in. The Tropics Restaurant . The Hi-Ho Lounge, so enticing with its neon blinking bubbles effervescing from the rim of a martini glass. Funks Grove, home of distinctive maple "sirup." My favorite was the series of ads for 50th on the Lake, a fancy Chicago motel. Air conditioned! TVs! Swimming pool! The graphic was vintage 1950s commercial art, a tank suit clad girl, her head egglike in a white swim cap, body folded into a jack knife dive and eternally suspended over a waterscape of Style Moderne wavelets. She remained in place till at least the late '60s, long after she became a camp figure in the advent of mid-century modern angularity.

Odell is roughly the halfway point between St. Louis and Holland. When driving alone, I stop for the night in the nearby larger town of Pontiac, where, curiously, there is a Route 66 museum that I have never visited. At this stage of my journey, I will have exited 55 just north of Bloomington at Towanda. From here on north, 66 exists in its original state, with one major difference: it's been converted to a two-lane road. Its other two lanes, the western half of the roadbed, have been abandoned. They lie moribund, slowly consumed by nature, as grass and weeds push through the concrete.

To the left, dying western roadbed of  Route 66. This section is in better condition than many. At right is the ribbon of remaining , two-way 66.

Still, you can make good time on the downsized, two-lane 66. These days it's not busy. There's a sense of peace, of refocus, in getting off the interstate, with plenty to notice. I like to look at the wildflowers: Queen Anne's lace, black eyed Susans, cornflowers. I'm always interested in the progress of Amtrak's improved roadbed for high-speed rail, which will eventually carry express trains between Chicago and St Louis at 110 miles per hour.

And I especially like watching the small towns on this stretch -- Towanda, Lexington, Chenoa--take back their own stretches of 66. They can't repave and maintain the entire thing, but they can each do a little something to preserve their heritage.  Towanda, for example, has planted young trees along its portion, placed benches and interpretive signs along the way.

The new walkway is maintained by local high school kids.       http://route66towanda.org/

Why? Because Route 66 is now revered as a symbol of America. People from all over the world come to immerse themselves in the experience, perfectly willing and eager to get out of their cars in the blazing Midwestern sun and stroll a few yards along the Mother Road. This very road that I, as a fidgety fourth-grader and later a blase young teen wanted to get quickly behind me, has been adopted by my twenty-first century counterparts and elevated to an icon.

Finally, the drive is over. I check into my Pontiac motel, rest up, then make a run north to the farm. And here I see the most dramatic change to the Route 66 landscape in all my years. Wind farms are hot in central Illinois; all that wind sweepin’ down the plain means big dollars for the energy industry. Forget the hawks, now it’s turbines turning lazy circles in the sky. Our farm is one of the few in the area lacking these installations; our choice.

See them back there? Turbines on the March. Debra Larson photo.

Standing beside the remains of our old barn, in the preternatural country quiet amid fields of beans and corn, I find these massive cartwheeling blades just the least bit menacing. Ah, well. Perhaps in the long run they will help stabilize global warming, and in the meantime,  I’ll get used to them, just as I've adapted to today's version of the Mother Road. Like the new Mooring, it is the familiar old friend ... even as it isn't.

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STRANGE SPRING
Random Musings

My mom with her eldest grandson. June 1995, high school graduation.

I'm sitting in my mother's apartment this fine May afternoon. She is near death--how near is anybody's guess--and seeing her so debilitated is surely an illusion. My feisty, independent, capable 95-year-old mother lies nearly helpless on a gel pad, soothed by a low dose of morphine, as we sit beside her assessing her pulse, breathing, measure of peace. She sleeps almost continually--but when awake communicates with tiny smiles, blinks and the occasional eye-roll directed at this or that caregiver.

A little while ago I told her I'd just had a shot of Vitamin B-12 .(We grow desperate for conversational fodder.) When I asked if she hadn't once had one, too, when I was little, she nodded. "Did it help? " By way of an answer, I got the nose-wrinkle that translates in MomSpeak to "meh." I mention my son's name and she makes instant, sharp eye contact. Mom loves her grandsons.

Monitoring my mother's state of being is not the only observation taking place these days. I watch my sister, as I have for months, years on end, in awe. She has been Mom's full-time advocate, serving with skill and grace. How did she learn this craft? Like her mother before her, she has the natural gift.

Beautiful May, crowning a splendid St. Louis spring. What a strange spring it's been, though, a dance of birth and approaching death. Concurrently, a season of upheaval, beginning actually in January, brought on by solid months of home improvements, inside our house and out. Dust and racket, workers in and out, packing, unpacking, repacking. Where the hell IS my toothbrush this week? In the end, totally worth it. Love our updates, especially the new wall color: Peach Dip. 

But for four months my brain has been a tangle and I feel permanently unfocused. Can't concentrate. Maybe the B-12 will do a better job on me than it did on Mom.

Michigan? Mooring Fever did descend in February, right on schedule. By now I'd normally be heading up I-196, saluting each landmark as I pass. Instead, I've remained in St. Louis and Howard has returned, to support me along this journey with my mother.

I stay in the moment, holding her hand, and together, we wait.

****

Now something I wrote in 1999, delivered at Eliot Chapel:

CREDO

This week I brought in the last of the peonies: a white, a pink, a deep rose. By now the peony bushes look like the other flowers in our perennial bed, overblown, dragged down by their own weight. This is always a poignant time of year for me, albeit my favorite--for its lush softness, for its unabashed color and fragrance and hope and promise, that I anticipate through interminable March days, and which ends so quickly.

May is the moment in which I feel most blessed. My birthday falls in May. It would be difficult, I imagine, for anyone observing a May birthday to ignore the floral fireworks that nature seems to ignite expressly for the birthday child's benefit. I plead guilty to a frisson of chosen-ness when I survey the spring flowers exploding in tribute to moi.

 Then I think about how I happened to get my peonies, and my perspective snaps smartly back where it belongs. The deep rose blossom comes from the Illinois farm that my father loved more than any place on earth. The white blossom--overwhelmingly the fragrance favorite--comes from a spot next to the foundation of a clapboard farmhouse on Lemay Ferry Road...home to my mother's family for nearly 150 years, and home to the ancestor of this very white blossom for at least 100 of those years. The pink blossom, whose name is Eleanor Roosevelt, and the only one in the garden whose name I know, is a newcomer, a birthday gift from my husband the first spring of our marriage. Each of these flowers lives in my garden today because someone loved me enough to go to the trouble of providing them.

Eleanor and friends, a bit past their prime.

There's nothing subtle about a peony, that Sadie Thompson of the spring garden. Hardiness is what you'd expect from so blatant a bloom, yet peonies don't like to be transplanted. My peonies, however, have all been transplanted at least once, and actually survived a nine-month tenancy in the flower bed of a dear friend, who took them in when we had to make a double move and couldn't bear to leave the peonies behind.

Through the various uprooting and transplanting, our peonies have managed to bring their friends along. Hidden among the peony eyes have been other roots and bulbs and corms, yielding surprise bouquets of jonquils, columbine, poppies, iris and phlox. The garden has also been expanded by my son, that keen observer of his sentimental mother, who has honored my recent birthdays with gifts of lilac bushes and a mock orange to replace the one that was bulldozed a couple of years ago, along with the house I grew up in. I look forward to the day when I put spade to earth, dig up a few precious shoots, place them in a sturdy cardboard box and, carrying on the tradition, deliver them in a very old car to my son's garden, for surely he will have one.

But perhaps not. The perennial garden, after all, teaches no life lesson more eloquently than that of its unplannable  nature. I smile at this, for I take comfort in it, and pull myself back into the glorious moment. I look at my flowers, inhale their almost impossible fragrance, and I'm overwhelmed with gratitude. For their beauty, for my life, for my May birthday in the passage of that life, for my husband and son, whose love and understanding astonish me... and for the inexorable force connecting these threads of life across all people and all cultures, and through all time.

*****

The following entry, "16 Behind the Scene," was posted in October 2015. I'm rerunning it here to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the airing of "16 in Webster Groves," on February 25, 1966. 

Subsequently, I was interviewed in the Webster-Kirkwood Times:   http://www.websterkirkwoodtimes.com/Articles-Features-c-2016-02-18-197725.114137-sub-16-In-Webster-Groves.html

and on The Carney Show, KTRS Radio: http://www.ktrs.com/16-in-webster-groves-the-cbs-documentary-that-looked-at-life-in-the-stl-suburb-in-the-mid-sixties-turns-50-years-old/


"16" BEHIND THE SCENE ~
How a community was leveled in sixty minutes

Fifty years ago during the autumn of 1965, CBS News sent a team to Webster Groves High School, where I was a senior, to begin filming a documentary titled “16 in Webster Groves.” 

Webster Groves High School

Our 16-year-olds, mostly juniors, had been chosen, they told us, to represent typical, upper middle class suburban teenagers; CBS wanted to explore the zeitgeist (they didn’t use that word) of the community and its teenagers, during what even a yurt-bound isolationist could see was a turning point in our nation’s history.

The result wasn’t pretty. Did they find, as they expected, unrest? Questioning?  Insurrection?  Mass demonstrations on behalf of civil rights?  A desire to overturn the comfy status quo and run Back to the Earth?  No. The students were portrayed, largely, as status-conscious, complacent, shallow, blinkered, casually racist and materialistic airheads, aside from a few awakening souls featured at the film’s conclusion. If the students looked pathetic, their parents looked appalling: dismissive, blowhard fathers, cipher mothers -- except for the one at the dinner table -- oblivious to any possibility of idealism, hopes, dreams, or aspirations, such as they were, on the part of their offspring.

The ensuing roar echoed from Webster Groves to CBS offices in New York City.  Unfair! Biased! Shameless manipulation! Willful omission of anything or anyone suggesting intellect, kindness, social awareness or embrace of a wider world view.

Fully expecting this response, the CBS crew came back to Webster Groves during the night that “16 in Webster Groves” aired nationally -- February 25, 1966 -- to film Websterites watching the program, and to record their reactions in a follow-up, “Webster Groves Revisited.” The second show aired about a month later.                     .

16  in Webster Groves, CBS News, 1966. Arthur Barron, producer. Charles Kuralt, narrator.

Webster Groves still talks about “16.” It has had unfortunate staying power. Nationally, the film was a staple in sociology curriculum for decades. It is still shown in documentary and filmmaking college courses. I got my own early indicator of its ubiquity six months after the airing, as I sat in a freshman orientation session at my college, some 300 miles from St. Louis. We were asked, one by one, to state the name of our high school. When I gave my answer, Tom H of Louisville, Kentucky, said “Webster Groves? That place in the TV show? Bleccchhh! ”

No use countering that I wasn’t even in the demographic: 17 at the time of filming, and a resident of Rock Hill, a considerably more modest adjoining suburb.  Clearly there would be no escaping the stigma.

I thought about all this last night while making notes for my next blog post, “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player.” It will include an oblique mention of the “16“ debacle, and the weird way in which I played a tiny part. But I had never Googled the film. What would I find?

First I found the film itself, unavailable for years, but now online with its companion piece, “Webster Groves Revisited,” in blurry print. 


To see it, click here.    
 
I then found some information on the filmmaker, Arthur Barron, and a little about cinema history. I’m passing it along now for the diversion of such followers who lived through “16“ right along with me, as well as for others who might have some time on their hands and want to see how a community could be laid waste in just 60 minutes (including commercials). 

Who was Arthur Barron?

Arthur S. Barron, Columbia Daily Spectator, February 1968

Arthur Barron, Ph.D., (1929-2000) was born in Boston. He held bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tulane University, and a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University. As a filmmaker, he would produce varied documentaries: a look at factory workers and their managers, portraits of Johnny Cash and Rita Hayworth, children’s programming for ABC and NET (one of these won him an Emmy). He made a noted cinema verite film called “Birth and Death." He ventured into feature films, and his “Jeremy" (1973, starring Robby Benson) took the award for Best First Work at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1968 he left CBS, formed his own company, Verite Productions, and simultaneously became director of the Columbia University film department.

In 1965, Barron was an employee of CBS News. He was not, however, a journalist, and was disinclined to follow one of the profession’s basic tenets: present a fair and balanced picture, giving voice to all sides of an issue. Hence CBS occasionally ordered him to change or delete program segments they deemed unjournalistic.  Earlier in 1965, he had been severely censored by his superiors when they saw the first cut of his film ”The Berkeley Rebels.”

“For networks the truth has to be recorded, not shaped,” Barron later said in an interview with author Alan Rosenthal (The New Documentary in Action, University of California Press,1972) . “The newsman is a kind of unfeeling, objective, analytic recorder and capturer of reality; he’s not a person who shapes and intensifies reality to evoke a particular response." But to shape and intensify is exactly what Barron wanted to do.

Ron Simon, a curator for the Paley Center for Media, knew Barron in his later life. In a 2011 interview with Thom Powers, artistic director for Stranger Than Fiction, a weekly documentary film series held at IFC Center in Greenwich Village  Simon recalled: “ [Barron] wanted to bring a new sensibility to the documentary. He saw himself as part novelist, a little bit of a poet, and was trying to make a statement in this film....He wanted to give his own viewpoint of what was happening in American society.” (To read the interview, see 16 In Webster-Groves)
 
That’s where Barron was when CBS assigned him a piece about teenagers, which would eventually evolve into “16." But if Barron wanted to avoid being muzzled after the Berkeley Rebels disappointment, he had to base his presentation on fact. So he approached the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and worked with them to develop a 36-page questionnaire, which was then administered to 16-year-olds at Webster Groves High School. Their anonymous answers yielded statistics, which in the eyes of network brass constituted facts...which meant Barron was good to go under the banner of CBS News. “The MacGuffin in this film,” says Simon, “is that sociological questionnaire.”

Barron claims to have been surprised by the results. He took them to the National Opinion Research Center. "They were amazed and horrified,” Barron tells Rosenthal. “[They saw] robotized children, dupes of the values which produced their parents and an American capitalist, middle class, bureaucratic society. Children who were perfectly designed replacement parts for suburban, placid America.”

Well before the study was conducted, Barron had approached the Webster Groves principal and school board for permission to make the film. He tells Rosenthal that he sold school officials on the idea by explaining that mass media had not so far portrayed teenagers accurately, and that CBS wanted to correct that. Barron admits he “wasn’t totally honest” when approaching the school board. “There was, as in so many films, a certain amount of conning and manipulating involved....I agree that I never said to the community or CBS that what we would find was a highly materialistic community whose individuality was crushed, and whose values were absolutely deplorable, but then those were things I didn’t know myself at the time.”

Why didn’t he seek out a broader cross-section of interviewees? “It’s not my job as a filmmaker to be an encyclopedia. I’m not omniscient. “ He goes on to say that he was out to capture the essential truth about a community, “and I wanted to do that in the strongest, most cinematic, most devastating way possible. I feel that the parents (shown) are the perfect embodiment of the dominant value system of that society, and that was my justification.”

Ron Simon told his interviewer that while manipulation was involved, Barron was honest about it. It appears, though, that Barron’s “honesty” came out only when the program was aired. Though Barron told CBS about the survey results early on, it does not appear that he revealed them or his filmmaking intentions to anyone in Webster Groves. 

“Webster Groves Revisited” is the sequel to “16," released about one month after “16“ hit the airwaves. It’s commonly said that the sequel was filmed because of the uproar generated by “16.” Produced and aired out of a sense of fair play, to give Websterites a chance to vent. Charles Kuralt implies it in his narration. Barron says so in his interview with Alan Rosenthal, claiming it was not his idea but CBS forced him to make the sequel. 

I don’t see how that could be the case. I believe Barron planned all along to “revisit”, knowing that his first program would provoke an outcry (“a howl of rage,” as he later described it). Otherwise, why would his crew have been on hand to record the subjects of the film watching themselves?  The Ron Simon interview suggests that doing so pushes the two films into the realm of cinema verite, as we see the camera that records it all, and the (unseen) director watching the interviewees watch themselves.

Fool me once...

As I mentioned earlier, I had a tiny role in the production. One day during that autumn of 1965, Barron and his associates visited our a cappella choir rehearsal to get an idea of what they might want to film. We pulled out every blockbuster in our repertoire, plus a lightweight little Broadway show ditty, “This Is a Great Country” (Irving Berlin, Mr. President, 1962). To my surprise, this is the number they chose to film. As it happened, I was piano accompanist for “Great Country."

"Our land is great, our land is great, our land is great, our land is great"

So there are my fingers, or chords, if you will, providing sound track for “16 in Webster Groves.” And if you watch “16,” you can see how our earnest choral offering was employed--talk about dupes of someone's values--to drive home one of the sociologist’s most cynical film statements.

Starting at 29:30 you see our choir director leading the group. Then the camera briefly pans the singers. But as the musical audio continues, the video switches from the choir to a montage of scenes. First we see a roast turkey, borne aloft straight from the oven by triumphant home ec students. Next, they’re baking pies. (Not apple, surprisingly.) Sprinklers play across a huge residential lawn. A girl practices her golf swing. Same girl, now part of a golf foursome strolling the country club grounds. Close-ups: lawn jockey, whiteface; lawn jockey, blackface. Gracious white two-story house, tasteful front entrance flanked by in-scale pillars. And the finale: a close-up of the rose window atop a local church door, before the camera pulls back to show the congregation spilling forth onto the streets of Webster Groves.  Open the doors, see all the people, song ends, cut to commercial.

Thus is “Great Country” rewritten, Barron style, as a hymn to the Middle Class American dream.

I’m not sure at what point I saw Barron’s intention in that sequence. But even in 1966, five years shy of my journalism degree, I knew something was off in his film. I felt that Barron had got a few things right (years later I would write an essay titled "I Was a Teenage Normie"), but via dishonest tactics. I’ve come to feel that the film is like a kaleidoscope: you can look inside, searching for a definitive stance, the one right way to assess Barron’s work -- fair, foul, truth, sham? -- but you never come to an end. The images and your opinions shift with every twist of the barrel.

My 50th high school reunion takes place next year, along with the 50th anniversary of “16 in Webster Groves.” If it’s like previous anniversary years, oceans of ink, forests of paper and billions of bytes will reconstruct yet again every nuance of Arthur Barron’s oeuvre. It could be interesting to invite Ron Simon of the Paley Center to speak to the community, share insights into Barron and his approach to “16,” moderate a panel discussion with audience feedback.

Oh, wait. Film criticism? Cinema verite? That might be a tad too intellectual for insular, myopic Webster Groves. No.... we’d rather just forget the whole thing.

As if we ever could, or would.

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Next:  Don’t Shoot the Piano Player

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This is a great country, a great country
So let's shout it clear and loud
Take a look in your history book
And you'll see why we should be proud.
Hats off to America
The home of the free and the brave
If this is flag waving, flag waving
Do you know of a better flag to wave?

Irving Berlin, 1962, Mr. President

    

February Trifecta

Following are three new entries centering around passages significant to me (a couple of which will be significant to Mooring friends, as well):

 - Happy Birthday, Charlotte ~  February 18

 - Thirty Years ~ February 15

 - Remembering Al Park       ~ February 14


Scroll down to begin:

Happy birthday, Charlotte!

Of all the photos I snapped of Charlotte through the years, this is my favorite, circa 1976

Charlotte Horner, February 18, 1906 - May 1996

 Thirty Years!
 

February 15, 1986

Thompson House Chapel, St. Louis, Mo.

The day dawned cold and clear following a 6" snowfall

We did it!

February 15, 2016

 

 

Still snowy, still glowy, still crazy after all these years...