Touch and Go

by Studs Terkel

  Now, I didn’t know when to quit. “I saw you in the Blackstone Theatre as Dr. Ned in O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. Judith Anderson was doing Lynn Fontanne’s role as Nina Leeds.” We later had a great dinner at Riccardo’s, which he insisted on buying. To be remembered—that’s what made you king of the hill. Not only were you celebrated in somebody’s eye, you were remembered long, long afterward. That your hands trembled a bit was a small matter. You counted.

  The third and undoubtedly most dramatic and traumatic encounter occurred in the early sixties. I had written a play, and a godawful one it was. It was called Amazing Grace at just about the time there was an upsurge of pop-folk influence and the hymn of the same name had become popular. It was to be a professional production at the University of Michigan theater. Alumnus Arthur Miller’s encouragement brought that theater into being.

  My play was almost all cast, with Cathleen Nesbitt and Victor Bono as the leads. We needed a strong character actor as an old time Wobbly, a garrulous guest at a men’s hotel. I immediately thought of an actor, James Bell. I haven’t the foggiest idea why he came to mind. I had seen him in a play some thirty to forty years before and I had never forgotten his brief performance.

  The play was The Last Mile by John Wexley. The locale was death row of a state prison and all were convicted and due for execution. The star was Spencer Tracy as Killer Mears. It may have been his last play before his explosive entry in the movies. But it was not he I most remembered in that play. It was a young actor, James Bell, who at the second-act curtain is led toward the electric chair. I was absolutely knocked out by that halting shuffle, absolutely mesmerized by this young actor.

  I do remember seeing his name now and then in the theater section. During the forever-run of Jack Kirkland’s adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, there appeared about a dozen Jeter Lesters: Henry Hull, Will Geer, James Barton, oh, God, too many to remember—and James Bell. A few years, uneventful, went by.

  It was then, during the University of Michigan enterprise, that Bell’s name so obstinately stuck with me. I figured he’d be about the right age: late sixties, early seventies. (My arithmetic was never any good.)

  I was frantic; I had to find him; he was my man. Equity came through: a member, James Bell, had retired and was living in either Virginia or the Carolinas. I forget which.

  I don’t recall how many phone calls I made: I know that I did not impoverish Illinois Bell. Finally, a voice at the other end, a faltering, very, very fragile one, answered. Oh, I do remember the conversation, if you want to call it that. Let me paraphrase it as best I can.

  VOICE: Yeah? (It was about four syllables).

  ME: James Bell? Are you James Bell, the actor?

  VOICE: Wha-a-at? I’m Jim Bell. Who you? What do you want? I’m not well. Make it snappy. [I tell him that I wrote a play and I’d like to cast him in it.]

  VOICE: You—you wha-a-at? Listen, I’m an old, old man, sick as a dog, and got no time for jokes.

  ME: I’m not kidding, Mr. Bell. I didn’t have a chance to see you as Jeter Lester. I hear you were great. But I did see you in—

  VOICE: (Cuts me short) Jeter Lester, yeah. A lotta guys did him. Look, I’m very tired. Say fast what you got to say.

  ME: Mr. Bell, do you know why I remember you in The Last Mile? Spencer Tracy was in it. But it was you who knocked me out at the curtain of the second act.

  VOICE: (Did he hear me?) Wha-a-at ya’ trying to tell me?

  ME: (Half shouting) I remember you as though it were yesterday. I’d like you in this part. (Now, I’m beginning to have my doubts.)

  VOICE: (Apparently something registered with him) You remember somethin’ that happened what? A hundred years ago. (It was only seventy or so.) You’re not kiddin’? You remember that. Jeez, I can’t hardly stand up. Ya’ know how old I am. Eighty-something. I feel like a hundred and ten. Naw, I can’t do it. Sorry.

  ME: I am, too, Mr. Bell. One thing I know—I’ll never forget you in The Last Mile. That walk . . .

  VOICE: (long pause) I heard what you said. You remembered me for something I did five hundred years ago. Gotta go now before I collapse. (Before he hangs up, I hear what appears to be a funny cackle and a mumble.) “He remembers me . . .”

  Click.

  AMAZING GRACE received among the most horrendous reviews possible. Had James Bell, lame, halt, and blind, undertaken the role, it would not have hurt at all.

  I still see him, young James Bell, in that second-act curtain, stealing the show from Spencer Tracy.

  Yeah, Bell is up there with Wamby in my King Tut pantheon, forever young. I’m certain neither was ever asked: “Wasn’t your name once James Bell?” Or “Wamby?” They had no need to be recognized by others, not while I was around . . . While I am around.

  As for the lethal phrase, “Didn’t your name used to be Dave Garroway?”—Charlie Andrews told me, as he kept company with Dave on his down, down, down ski-slide, he’d heard a curious cabbie ask it. I never had any reason to question Charlie Andrews, nor do I now. I still carry the fish-head cane that Charlie Andrews’ widow, Amy, sent me. It helps this lame and this halt on his daily way to Canaanland. Each time I stare down at the fish-head cane he bequeathed me, Charlie says: Simply tell it as it was. Hang on to that cane.

  23

  Two Towns Called Girard

  History does not refer merely to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

  —James Baldwin

  Girard, Pennsylvania, 1982. It is an industrial town, thirty miles out of Erie. Its people, mostly blue-collar, are experiencing hard times. Since then, things have become much worse.

  A controversy had arisen concerning the use of the book Working in a high school class. A teacher, Kay Nichols, had made it mandatory reading, in conjunction with a course on American labor. The parents of two students objected; they had discovered some four-letter words in the book. It had been an assignment since 1978. Until now, there had been no objections.

  I was invited to the school by the Girard Board of Education. There was to be a public discussion in the auditorium that evening.

  I am visiting a classroom in the afternoon. The students range in age from fifteen to eighteen.

  HELENE: Our neighbor has the book. My mom looked at it and said some of the words are unnecessary.

  ME: How did she discover the words?

  HELENE: She was glancing through, I guess.

  ME: Have you any idea what effort it would take to find those words in a six-hundred-page book?

  BOY: I found one. (General laughter.)

  ANGIE: I could see the Christians’ point of view. They don’t think that language should be used. But we’re not lookin’ in it for smut words. We’re readin’ the book as a book.

  JIM: A good book moves me. When I read one, it makes me think I should read more instead of just throwin’ it back on the shelf.

  PEGGY: I don’t see why they’re objectin’ to it. They read worse every day. They speak the same language that’s in the book. They’re no better than what people say in there.

  DON: Maybe some of those words could be changed and get the same meanin’ across.

  JIM: If he would have used any other words, it would have had a totally different meaning. Like Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind, when he said, “Frankly, I don’t give a—.”

  Jim hesitated and didn’t use the word “damn.”

  BETSY: If they use a word like “damn” all the time on TV, movies, people get used to it. Like this movie, Clark Gable said, “Well, I don’t give a damn,” that was really shocking back then. And then people got to thinking if they said it on TV screens and on the radio, you got used to it. So they started using more offensive words.

  ME: What does “damn” mean to you?

  BETSY: It’s damning to hell. Think of the meaning behind that word. If
somebody didn’t look through that book, aha, they got away with it.

  ME: You interpret the word literally, not as a piece of slang. The Bible, too?

  BETSY: Of course.

  ME: You don’t believe in evolution?

  BETSY: Of course not. Hardly anyone here believes in that.

  ME: Does anyone in this class believe in evolution?

  Silence. No one raises his or her hand. There are about fifty students.

  JIM: Try to keep an open mind about things, not right away shuttin’ it out.

  BETSY: I know people read this book before and they don’t want to read it again because they didn’t enjoy it. They should have this choice.

  TERRY: They’re not required to read the whole book. They can skip the parts with the smut words.

  BETSY: But if there’s something I didn’t believe in, I wouldn’t want to read it.

  STACY: Do you always believe in everything you read, evolution and all that? I think it’s good to sometimes read something you don’t believe in because you see other people’s views and it helps you form your own.

  THAT EVENING the school auditorium was standing-room-only, overflowing with parents and students. It had something of a carnival spirit rather than a girding for battle; not too dissimilar from the feel of a crowd at a high school basketball game.

  There was a touch of tension when the objecting parents entered with twenty or so of their supporters, in tight formation. Yet there was something else, something poignant. It was not a Roman phalanx so much as a laager. They were in encircled covered wagons, surrounded by hostile forces about to overwhelm them. They were moms and pops who had worked hard all their lives so their children could grow up as decent, hardworking, God-fearing Christians in a world of woe. And Sin.

  The image of Mrs. B. is still with me. A tough little sparrow, resembling the Irish actress Una O’Connor, she really let me have it. Constantly shushing her boy, Tom, who was wildly erupting with scriptural citations, she was eloquent in her wrath, her hurt, her terrors of something dark out there.53

  It wasn’t the language so much to which she objected. It was the spirit of discontent she found in the book. As, once more, she pushed her boy aside—he was now Jimmy Swaggart sailing into me with Colossians or Corinthians—she spoke of a hard life, heavy laden enough without still more sorrows burdening the young pilgrims at school. Why not show the happy side of people’s lives, the cleansing and godly side? Isn’t there enough trouble in the world?

  All the folks in Tennessee are as faithful as can be

  And they know the Bible teaches what is right.

  They believe in God above and his great undying love

  And they know they are protected by his might.

  Then to Dayton came a man with his new ideas so grand

  And he said we came from monkeys long ago.

  But in teaching his belief Mr. Scopes found only grief

  For they would not let their old religion go.

  —Fragment from a song by Vernon Dalhart, 1925

  1960. John T. Scopes, middle-aged, is listening to the recording. We are seated in a Chicago radio station. Dalhart’s voice comes through bell-clear, despite the record’s scratch. I tell my guest it sold a half-million copies in 1925. “I didn’t know I was that popular,” he says.

  Scopes, a young teacher in a Dayton, Tennessee, high school, a young teacher of biology, had been tried for having violated a state statute: No theory of the origins of man could be taught that contradicted the Book of Genesis. The trial lasted eleven hot July days in 1925. The contest between Clarence Darrow, attorney for the defense, and William Jennings Bryan, prime witness for the prosecution, is celebrated in folklore as well as history. The devastating effect on Bryan’s life is also common knowledge.

  Toward the end of our studio conversation, another recording by Vernon Dalhart is heard. He had written it as a tribute to Mr. Bryan, who died five days after the trial ended.

  There he fought for what was righteous and the battle it was won.

  Then the Lord called him to heaven for his work on earth was done.

  If you want to go to heaven and your work on earth is through,

  You must believe as Mr. Bryan, you will fail unless you do.

  “Yes,” says Scopes, “I think the tragedy is more man’s than Bryan’s. Because we haven’t advanced too much.”54

  GIRARD, KANSAS, 1867 onward.

  It was so named in honor of his hometown in Pennsylvania by Dr. Charles Strong, a deer hunter. As far as I know, and what a couple of old Wobblies at the Wells-Grand told me, this expectedly conservative town experienced some remarkable and strange happenings between the years 1895 and 1922.

  A freethinking, American Socialist journal, Appeal to Reason, was published in this town. Though native as its base, it had many immigrant adherents who remembered their own dreams and the works of Thomas Paine and all those other visionaries. There was a time when its circulation approached a million.

  John Graham of the University of Nebraska Press noted: “Although almost erased from our collective memory that was selectively focused on the American character, war, party politics, ideas, and great men to the exclusion of the faceless ‘inarticulate’ working people, those same Americans created a challenging movement as the twentieth century began.”

  With the Gilded Age, the growth of trusts, the powerful, “so ordained by God” as George Baer proclaimed; as World War I broke out, and the Palmer raids broke in, especially into the homes of outspoken immigrant militants—and don’t forget the flivver and the harvester—all these factors succeeded in breaking down these urges and movements. Reason was equated with treason in the quarters of the powerful. A danger to the status quo had to be exorcised. Some of the old boys in the lobby of the hotel still got a bang out of recounting that hopeful epoch, even though the falcon had already flown.

  Every now and then, old Bill Brewer, whose gnarled hands intimated the jobs he’d had in the fields, on the railroads, and on the waters, would haul out of his hip pocket a little blue book. Let’s not forget this informal library. E. Haldeman-Julius was the publisher. There were far more than a thousand of these nickel blue books published in, yeah, Girard, Kansas. They were published primarily for workingmen on the road, so they could read while they ran. You name it, they published it.

  The first among the thousand little pocket-sized books that followed was Robert Burns. It is, I am told, still its bestseller, without any assist from Oprah. I challenge you to name one Scotsman, unlettered though he may be, who doesn’t know a stanza, let alone, a line from Rabby Burns.

  (Ironic note. How many can I call upon?) When I had that slight encounter in Pennsylvania’s Girard, the wild-eyed boy, whose mother’s case I found so moving, was named Robert Burns. The father, whose name was Robert, too, was silently standing by, addressing his knuckles. It was Mrs. Burns who was so overwhelmed by all the craziness and Godlessness that was holding sway and trying to hush-a-bye her lone child, Robert Jr.

  When I discovered the name he bore, I felt so hopeful. Perhaps I could bring up the subject and tell him of his father’s namesake. The more I tried “a man’s a man for a’ that” and “The best-laid plans of mice and men,” the more furiously he threw Luke, Mark, Paul, and Peter at me, citing the book it was from and the numerical code. He didn’t hear a word I said, and here is the moment that really destroyed me. As Mrs. Burns wiped her face with her apron, she urged him to listen. She did want him to know some things outside his sphere.

  The next day, when the big papers, as she referred to them, the Pittsburgh Gazette and the Los Angeles Times, ridiculed her, I felt I had lost it all.

  Namesakes: the two Girards; the two Burns families. There had to be some other more civil way than further hurting and humiliating these hard, hardworking people.

  THANKS TO OUR ELDER GUESTS and my brother Meyer, I subscribed; that is, I replied to the full-page ads of the blue-book people in the alternative journals, such as The
Nation and old-time prototypes of The Village Voice. For one buck plus postage you received twenty such marvelous works. To name a few of the thousands: Bernard Shaw, Tom Paine, Tolstoy’s Essays, Darrow giving the literal interpretation of the Bible a hard time, Voltaire, Aristotle, Whitman, of course, down the line to Fabre’s lectures on the Mason Bee.

  After some seventy-five years, if I searched my messed-up closets arduously enough, I’d probably find a John Ruskin blue book. No Billy Sundays here.55 (Did you know that a long Sandburg poem, a polemic such as you never have seen, was held off publication for years, it was so inflamatory? And so direct: He called a fink a fink.) Oh, there was Frederick Douglass and old Abe’s best speeches.

  What it does tell us is that a yearning is there, expressed in one manner or another as to what we can be about, something of peace, grace, and beauty. The dreamer could be an autodidact, raised on nickel blue books, or a Harvard grad.

  Girard, Pennsylvania, tells me one thing; and that one magic moment in Girard, Kansas, tells me another.

  Claude Williams, a circuit rider (traveling evangelist) who I interviewed for Hard Times, comes to mind some forty years after we spoke.

  I’ve used the Bible as a workingman’s book. You’ll find the prophets—Moses, Amos, Isaiah, and the Son of Man, Old Testament and New—you find the Pharaohs, the Pilates, the Herods, and the people in the summer houses and the winter houses. These people like John the Baptist are our people and speak our word, but they’ve been kidnapped by the others and alien words put in their mouth to make us find what they want us to find. Our word is our sword.

  I interpreted this for the sharecroppers. We had to meet in little churches, white and black. It was in the tradition of the old underground railway. I translated the Bible from the vertical to the horizontal. How can I reach this man and not further confuse him? He had only one book, the Bible. This had to be the book of rights and wrongs. True religion put to work for the fraternity of all people. All passages in the Book that could be used to further this day I underlined in red pencil. The Book fell open to me.