Quote:
Originally Posted by Grantham Forester
Steve, did I understand you correctly in your post? You recently wrote about your growing up in Kansas? The Prairie Queen was the name of the church, the area was settled by Swedes and Norwegians, Haavik, Skofer, Eggebrotten- it was all the same in "The Prairie Queen". I'm not critic, but I think Jack Curtis captured the rural American farmer spirit very well in his writing-- "Ya, we get the Monkey Ward Catalog, and when it shows- Good, Better, best- we always order best-- Nice gun, have to watch that safety though- me, I just got an old Nitro Marvel, but they all shoot the birds-- lines like that paint a picture of Sivert Haavik like Van Gogh did with "The Starry night"- IMO anyway. Like to see your story, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Montana, Idaho-- truly our "Heartland" even if you are not a hunter!
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LOL; just re-read this post and NOW I understand it. Oh, well; too many martini's I guess.
Of course we all had the Monkey Wards Catalogue, and the Herter's one too. I used to love paging through it dreaming of owning the guns, but I never bought one. Lee Harvey Oswald put them out of business.
An Amazing thing about Bucklin was that while it only housed about 800 souls it sported a complex social structure, with well established cliques that did not talk. Oh, the men did, but the women pretty much kept to their own group. And gossip! The people in that town took it to a high order! My wife tells the story of sitting in those iron chairs on the front porch along with my grandmother, mother, aunt and cousin, all women. Pat didn't say a word, she just sat amazed at the skill and depth of the gossip. y grandmother was 90 and my cousin 25, but that did not matter. They were equals on that gossipy front porch. There were no secrets in that little town.
In the 50's after we returned home after a trip my other grandmother would pick up the phone, there was no dial; the operator would answer, (she worked at the telephone switchboard just down the street), and say, "Hi Melinda, say I've been gone for two weeks (Melinda already knew this.) and was wondering what is going on in town?" Melinda would fill her in. Nope, no secrets at all.
The town was located where it was because of an artesian well. They used to have a water trough right in the middle of main street. The city fathers decided to provide water to the citizens for free. The result was the place looked like a little oasis with large emerald green lawns, mature cottonwoods and spritely flowers, all this surrounded by the vast, empty prairie.