THE MILL RUN COLUMNS
Mill Run: “Bore”
By Moritz Thomsen
[No clipping, written
in notebook]
Los Molinos Sun
Someone’s definition
of a bore, that covers about 60% of the territory, is: a person who, when you
ask him how he is, tells you. A good proportion of the remaining 40% of the
bore population consists of war veterans who somehow stopped living when they
shed their uniforms and who are, years later, still reliving in their minds
what apparently were the only significant periods of their lives.
I can remember growing
up in the years after the first world war, and knowing certain friends of the
family who, in my childish brain, possessed only one characteristic. Joe knew
Rickenbacker; Bob was gassed at Belleau Wood; Harry was stationed in
With this introduction
I now propose to enter the ranks and bore you with a few of my own war
mementos. After all, Eisenhower, Churchill, and just about anyone else you’d
care to mention had done it and I certainly don’t want to be left out.
If any single action
of mine still lives in the memories of anyone in my bombardment group, if I am
still remembered at all, I am in all probability that fellow that was sent out
one day to bomb the railroad station in
This mission made me
locally famous, but one we went on about a month later is the mission that in
it contained a five minute period that is my own most important five minutes,
and if you want to get right down to it, it is the most important five minutes
for about 5,000 other people who don’t even know it. This was the one and only
chance I ever got to play at being God.
That day because all
of our primary targets were covered with clouds we were released from our
definite objective. At the time we received this message we were touring around
in
It was a little
medieval town of about 10,000 people, a perfectly round town with red tile
roofs and a cathedral in its exact center from which the streets radiated out
like the spokes of a wheel. The name of the town was New Kalen, and it was a
farm town, and through the bombsight even from 10 miles off you could see the
windows shining in the sun and the carts parked in the streets.
Destroying that town
was simply inconceivable, but I went through all the motions, crouching over
the bombsight and twiddling knobs and pushing buttons. And at the last minute I
called the colonel on the intercom and said that out past the town about 3
miles I could see a military airfield and was going to bomb it instead.
I imagine we were at
least 50 miles from any airfield at the moment, but it sounded very military
and tactical and the colonel said O.K. That is the true story behind the
headlines of how within a period of 30 days our particular group was enabled to
once more deal a death blow to the German brussels sprout industry. I imagine
these two missions didn’t cost the
“Mill Run”
Los Molinos Sun
By M.T. [Moritz
Thomsen]
“Friends”
One of my best friends
made a special trip out to the ranch the other day, a round trip of about 12
miles at a cost of at least a dollar, just to tell me something disparaging and
libelous that Jack Wood had reportedly said to someone else about me. There was
just enough meanness in what was theoretically said so that hearing it suddenly
without expecting it was like being slapped across the face, and there was just
enough truth in it so that I don’t quite have the guts to report it here.
It wasn’t until a couple of hours
after this special trip that I realized what an overpowering sense of joy had
possessed my friend as he watched my face go react to this unexpected attack
from an unexpected quarter. His eyes flashed and glittered with excitement; his
face was almost as red as mine; and unless I’m badly mistaken he was even
panting slightly. I don’t remember when I’ve ever seen him so happy unless it
was about a month ago while he was telling me that his daddy thought my column
was stupid. I must have shrugged my shoulders; at least I didn’t collapse, and
a look of uncertainty appeared in his face. “Slim thinks it stinks, too,” he
said. Still no reaction, and he began to panic. He sat there in his car,
revving his motor nervously, trying to figure out how to get on top of the
situation. “Cheez,” he said finally in a tone of disgust, “why don’t you get a
haircut?”
Not all of us are fortunate to have
a full-blown, 100 percent, guaranteed sadist for a friend. Sadists are sort of
out of style these days; they just don’t hardly make a good old fashioned
sadist any more like Kraft-Ebbing used to interview back in the dying days of
the Victorian era. If you ever meet one, cultivate and cherish him. He will be
an education, illuminating and pointing up the dark side of human nature like
nothing else.
Because the truth is, as Freud
pointed out, that you learn about human motivations and studying the so-called
abnormal. Everyone contains everything; we differ only in degree.
What I learned, for instance, is
that there are three distinct pleasures involved in the small town habit of
tearing down your neighbor. There is the primary pleasure which comes from
saying the thing in the first place, that swelling of the ego that comes from
judging someone. By pushing someone down a little you automatically end up a
little higher than you were. An illustration of this can be found in the south,
where an entire race has found it necessary to push down another entire race.
The amazing thing is that the ones who are pushing the hardest, who hate the
negro the most, are the poorest, most squalid and ignorant, the ones who come
the closest to the negro in the way they live. “We man not be much,” they seem
to be saying, “but at least we’re better off than a nigruh. We got white skin.”
The second pleasure belongs to the
one who passes along the calumny, the one who in your most vulnerable moment
comes up with, “You know what so-and-so said about you? He said you were so
stupid that you made a half-wit look like a Ph.D. by comparison.” What most of
us don’t realize is that 90 percent of everything mean we say about someone is
immediately reported to them; the temptation is simply too great.
The pleasure, the greatest one of
all, belongs to the party who was maligned. His tongue no longer held in check
by loyalty or feelings of friendliness, he is now free to seek his revenge. At
this moment, for instance, I am peeking over the fence at Jack Wood just
waiting for him to hit a prune tree with his disk or do something stupid. You
can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as he does the world is going to hear
about it.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Silence”
For almost everyone
there is something terrifying about standing in front of another person and
being unable to think of something to say. Probably because we carry in us the
same blood as the swarming monkeys who go swinging through the tropical forests
incessantly chattering to one another we are under this compulsion to leave no
silence between us. Judging by the letters that teenagers direct to counselors
which you can read in the papers and magazines, next to the question of how
many times you have to go out with a boy before the violent necking can
properly begin, the problem of what to say to one another is their biggest
headache.
And it is something
that never leaves you. I know an increasing number of people who as they grow
in both years and wisdom have completely eliminated parties from their lives
simply because the dread the possibility that they will have to meet some
stranger and stand there, both of them staring balefully into each other’s
faces futilely trying to find the proper noises to make. After about three
minutes like this, believe me, the tension becomes almost unbearable.
This is the nightmare
of every woman who ever gave a dinner party, that that moment will arrive right
in the middle of the roast beef when the guests sitting around the table who, a
moment before had all been talking at once, will suddenly find themselves
plunged into a tomb-like silence. I have seen hostesses do the most ridiculous
things in order to break up one of those endless stillnesses. It’s a stillness
like nothing else in the world, a shrieking kind.
My own personal experience
with a shattering silence took place in
I stopped for him and
we rode together for almost an hour from one desolate spot in an endless waste
of desert to another spot just as desolate, and in that time he didn’t say a
word. He must have been 80 years old, and he was dressed in rags, and his
clothes were permeated with the smell of smoke as though he had crouched over
thousands of little sagebrush fires trying to keep warm.
A very odd thing
happened in the last half hour of our journey together, after the shock of
discovering that he wouldn’t or couldn’t talk to me had worn off. A sort of
terrible accusing communication began to take place between us. He was old
[copy cuts off] away from his farm land into the sand dunes. It was a silent
conversation loaded with guilt, and it involved this worthless country through
which we were driving, and it involved the rags he was wearing and his
hopeless, degrading poverty.
I tried to sign a
separate peace with that old Indian; I flashed him psychic flashes of
friendship and sympathy, but I don’t know that I got through to him. In fact
I’m half convinced that I didn’t because when finally he motioned for me to
stop, and as he was climbing out of the car, I got a very strong final message
that went something like this: “Go home, pale-face Gringo. Sell that foolish
little toy of a Geiger counter, and be a farmer again like you’re supposed to.”
And I did, and I’ve
been in trouble ever since. The way I see it he gave me the Indian sign, and
I’m living under the curse of the Navajos. I could tell that old boy things
about poverty now that would make his braids stand right straight up.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Sportsmen 1”
About a month ago I
wrote a column about sportsmen which I must admit in all modesty was just about
the greatest little piece of prose to come out of this century. Mr. Earl
Murphy, the publisher of the Los Molinos Sun, read it with a growing pallor,
looked at me with his great sad Irish eyes, and shook his head. “Good jumped-up
heavens, young man,” he moaned. “We can’t run this. You can’t say this about
sportsmen.”
I began to pout. “It’s just a
personal opinion,” I ventured.
Mr. Murphy shuddered and tore the
typewritten sheets into little squares. We watched them as they drifted to the
floor. “Better rewrite it, my boy. Better leave out those somewhat derogatory
remarks.”
“O.K., dad,” I said. “I’ll rewrite
it without saying what I really think. I will merely illustrate it.”
••••
In the field of sports
the one fact more than any other which makes any particular game exciting is
the degree to which the opponents are evenly matched. The spectator, for
instance, to a football game enjoys that game in proportion to the degree of
uncertainty as to its outcome. Unless, of course, he is afflicted with certain
sadistic tendencies.
If I may be permitted a digressive
personal opinion, Mr. Murphy, watching a football game is about as exciting as
watching two old women shell peas, and in fact the only game I ever really
enjoyed ended up 286—0. I did more than just watch this one; I was a
participant on the losing side, but it was a game of epic grandeur, a sort of
morality play with the heavenly hosts completely vanquishing the forces of
evil—or vice versa.
But in the normal spectator at the
ideal game the excitement steadily mounts to the last second when, even after
the gun has sounded, good old number 67, Poltowski, crashes through the line
and changes the score. Hooray!
How does the hunter, the sportsman,
come out when judged by these elemental standards? Is there any element of
equality in his outdoor expedition, a sharing of risk, any chance at all, for
instance, that the deer will shatter his legs with a lead slug or leave him in
some undiscovered thicket slowly to bleed his life away? There have been cases,
of course, where the deer did shoot the hunter, but usually the aim is
careless, and the sportsman unfortunately recovers. I doubt if these exceptions
show up on the statistical graphs.
Or birds. The only thing they can
aim at a hunter is aimed in panic and even if they score a bullseye it is
seldom if ever fatal. Just messy.
I wonder how many sportsmen there
would be if they had a 50-50 chance with the hunted, or even to be more
reasonable, say a 90 percent chance of coming back alive. I’ll wager the woods
would be deserted and quietly peaceful as in a day in 1491. I can speak with
some authority on this, remembering the sheer horror that reigned in our bomber
group overseas during the war when we were flying over
The Sacramento Bee ran a story about
a hunter who jumped off a log onto the back of a sleeping three-point buck. In
the first moments of confusion the hunter dropped his gun and had to face an
enraged animal with only his hunting knife. They fought together for 30 minutes
or so, the deer charging and goring with his antlers and the hunter slashing
away with his knife. The words “hunter” and “hunted” suddenly became
meaningless. It was a good fair game played for the maximum stakes.
I think it was his friends who
hauled the man off to the hospital and dressed out the buck for him, and I hope
while he was there they fed him great juicy chunks of venison. He earned them.
Now there’s my idea of a real he-man
sportsman, but I can’t help wondering if he’s going out again next year.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Sportsmen 2”
That terrible time of
the year is coming up now when the farmer is under daily pressure to turn his
land over to the sportsman for dalliance. An endless stream of cars will soon
be pouring through the ranch gates loaded to the springs with heavy-lidded,
pig-eyed brothers from the city, little gangster types with 5 o’clock shadows,
dirty plaid shirts, and moving about in the center of an aura of whiskey fumes.
They have one thing in common, one unifying lust—to kill something.
It is dangerous and foolish to
generalize, but disregarding a few exceptions, I feel safe in offering a
personal opinion: Sportsmen are the scum of the earth.
Within the recent past and in this area:
1. A wild sow near Manton was shot and her
litter left to die, and
2. A doe on the river bottom was shot and
her fawn found later starved to death.
One of my sportsman
neighbors told me how he had caught a washtub full of frogs one night out of
Champlain Slough. “We got everything,” he said, his idiot face glowing with
sportsman ecstasy. “There wasn’t a frog left when we got through.”
One thing he forgot to do before he
cut their legs off was to kill them. It took some of them a week to die.
I asked young Frank Anonymous how
he’d done the opening day of dove season. “Cool, daddy-o,” he told me. “I used
4 boxes of shells and got 2 doves, 1 woodpecker, 5 prune trees, and an old
washing machine.” Now my theory is that anyone over 10 years old who can look
into the beady little eyes of a woodpecker and then blast him into death is
lacking some component of humanity.
“And what’s your theory?” I asked my
friend, Lloyd, yesterday, tirelessly gathering facts and opinions for my
readers.
“The sportsman,” Lloyd told me,
standing up straight and reading from notes he had prepared in anticipation of
the question. “The sportsman is insecure. He sees a look in his wife’s face, he
is nagged by secret doubts; he has been brought to a point where he has to
prove to himself and perhaps to others that he is a man. Disregard the obvious
Freudian symbolism which is too obscene to discuss in the columns of a family
newspaper and think of the sportsman as a man driven by his own inadequacies to
perform the rite of the hunter, the provider, or think of him as—”
“O.K., Lloyd,” I interrupted. “You
can sit down now. The column for this week is already too long.”
So he did.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Tapdancing bird”
Moritz Thomsen
Notebook in possession
of
Rashani Rea
No date, 1959 or 1960
Not included with
“Mill Run” clippings
Ah, the little things
in life.
At
Now I am of the school who believes
that there is probably nothing more idiotic in life than 20,000 lousy birds
crowded together in the branches outside your window, all of them hooting,
whistling, screeching, and proclaiming the obvious. The obvious is that it is
But my dancing bird is another
story. Here’s a bird who thinks for himself. I have never seen this friend of
mine except in imagination, but I know exactly how he looks; he is a scruffy
wizened little drab, undersized, near-sighted and probably afflicted with
chronic hepatitis, but he has the biggest, most magnificent feet in the whole
state, great shiny butter-colored feet that glisten in the early morning
sunshine as though they had been freshly enameled.
And my bird, poor obsessed little
creature, madly in love with these glistening, yellow claws, simply can’t tear
his eyes away from the intricate dance steps that he performs each morning on
my roof. He doesn’t sing, whistle, or hoot, but he croaks. Once about every 3
minutes a day an ecstatic croak erupts from deep within him. It is a croak of
pure joy and it sounds like a stepped-on toad.
Now actually in my whole day
probably nothing happens that is more casual and unimportant than this
heel-and-toe artist soft shoeing around on the roof. And yet I get a pleasure
out of this event way out of proportion to its significance. Practically
everything else that goes on around me is anti-climax. I lie in bed each
morning in the semi-darkness, laughing, giggling, slapping my legs and yelling
“Ole” and “Encore” to my dancer.
I wanted to write an inspiring
article celebrating the little things in life. The big things in life, like
love, money, sex, nuclear fission, friendship, and the North wind, it seems to
me, are all highly overrated, are all about equally compounded of pleasure and
pain and to get involved with them is to risk getting your back broke. I wanted
to make a nice long list of all the little things in life that are made up of
nothing but sheer pleasure, starting with my dancing bird, then moving on to
those first life-giving cups of coffee, and going on from there.
But I have been sitting here now for
3 hours, sifting the brain, and nothing comes to mind. Carrying these notes to
a logical conclusion would seem to indicate that unless you have a tap dancing
bird performing on your roof each morning, you have nothing and might as well
put a bullet through your head. This may not be a bad idea, but it’s not
exactly what I started out to say.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“TV”
Now that we are full into fall with darkness coming even
before the chores are done, there isn’t much to do with the evenings except
look at Television. The wiser alternative would be to go to bed, but there is
something uncivilized about retiring at
For the last couple of weeks, with a
feeling of complete moral degradation, I have been knuckling under to T.V. It
has been a real capitulation, brought about by the annual agricultural crisis,
the one this year being a combination of lousy corn and lousy hog prices.
Reality being a little too thick, heroin and alcohol too expensive, and no good
dependable source of marijuana available, I have turned to channel 12 for
solace.
I have been going right down the
line with the television boys beginning with the children’s programs, the
30-year-old animated cartoons, to the bitter end, to the late show or the late
late show. If I have guests I pour them a cup of coffee, sit them in a corner,
and ignore them. I have turned my mind into a great blotter which sops up hour
after hour the fruits of our national technological genius. There is something
magnificent about Tagg asking Annie Oakley for another Wonder Bread sandwich,
and you don’t know why until you realize that it is helping him to grow 12
different ways—up, down, sideways, upside down, inside out, slantways. A truly
educational medium. Until I turned on my T.V. set, for instance, I had never
had a clear idea of the mechanics of a headache, how those little hammers and
bolts of lightning kept working in your head until you coated your stomach with
acid flare-ups, to make you feel like happy days are here again.
Being a hog man, I had reconciled
myself to the fact that I would drift through life in the center of a cloud of
hog doo-doo fumes. But it’s not true, I have recently discovered. There are
roll-on deodorants on the market that won’t stain even my sheerest nylons, and
that will absolutely paralyze the olfactory nerves of anyone who wanders within
10 feet of me. Or I can use that new soap which is 45% whipped cream, shaped
like a rowboat, makes pink suds, and coats you with a thin layer of grease that
good, self-respecting odor-producing bacteria wouldn’t be found dead in.
Apparently this new product is so efficient that even if you only bathe every
forty days you can still stand in front of a big piece of glass or something
and have some guy throw horse shoes, tennis balls, golf balls, or rocks at you
and you just keep smiling your little idiot smile because, man, you’re protected.
Life is so simple, really. You coat
your body with a film of ST-37, coat your teeth with a film of Gardol, put a
little film of Jab on your ingrown toenails, coat your stomach and the 19 miles
of your intestines with a film of good dependable acid neutralizer, get the old
bile dripping through those old fatty particles, take an Ex Lax or two for
regularity, and you’ve only got one thing to worry about.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Vulgarity”
Once in a short story
writing class our teacher, recoiling against a particularly ribald contribution
from one of the students, gave us a lecture on vulgarity in writing. She was a
middle-aged spinster, and, I’ve always thought, a little thin-blooded and
over-refined, even though at the time she was one of the top women writers.
Occasionally she was compared with Edith Wharton and even, by critics who
didn’t know better, with Willa Cather.
She told us this true story,
blushing violently as she did so, as an example of material which went far
beyond the bounds of good taste, material which was unsuitable for commitment
to print. The reason I remember it so well is that out of a class of 30 who sat
there primly agreeing with her, I was the only one who laughed. The great
whooping HO HO ho of laughter made me feel awfully foolish later, and in a way
isolated me from both the teacher and the class for the rest of that year. I
was the only westerner there, the only savage, and had been regarded with a
certain measure of suspicion anyway.
A fat, middle-aged man, she told us,
had gone to the
Sometime later he was startled out
of his reverie of adventure and romance when he noticed a woman advancing up
the aisle looking for a seat. He swung up ponderously to his feet to let her
by, zipping his pants as she sidestepped by him—and you guessed it, zipping not
only his pants but a great chunk of her dress as well.
I guess no one could describe the
next 10 minutes, the screams of murder and police, the tugging and groanings
and pullings of that poor old man, or how in the largest theater in the world
the attention of thousands of people suddenly shifted from the silver screen to
that sweating, struggling pair, wedded together in a relationship like
something out of Dante’s Inferno. The divorce took place much later in the
manager’s office after they had done a prison lock step up the aisle and
through the foyer. It was accomplished with a pair of scissors, when a piece of
dress from the woman’s behind was removed.
What reminded me of the story was
wondering what constituted vulgarity. My sister told me another story last
week, a story that for quite different reasons seemed to come much closer to a
true vulgarity. It was told to her by an old retired gentleman who in the first
years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency acted as his press secretary.
He swears it is true, she said.
It seems that the president of
“I want no incidents of any kind,”
the president said.
And there weren’t.
For five days things went off in a
flawless manner. There were state dinners, visits from dignitaries, and all the
usual courtesies due a VIP. The morning of the Haitian president’s departure
arrived. He left on a train for
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“War”
Check appearance in
smokebox site
Hand written in
notebook, in possession of Rashani Rea
No Date; no clipping
from Los Molinos Sun
Going to war is the
ultimate experience for the youngster. It has everything, and the beauty of war
is, as any young man knows, that he as an individual is immortal; it is always
the other guy who gets blown to hell.
Basically, the glamour and romance
of war, the brass buttons and the medals, the enraptured look of the mother or
the sweetheart, hinge on that basic question of the individual’s manhood. War
is, in the young kid’s mind, the test of his courage, and his masculinity. We
have so arranged our world that about every once every twenty years all our
healthy young men get this wonderful opportunity to prove their manhood. So far
we have constructed no satisfactory substitute. The art of fisticuffs, for
instance, that most obvious technique for proving manhood, appeals in large
part only to the psychotic element in our society. Boxing doesn’t prove that a
man is a man, only that he is an animal and a mentally disturbed one at that.
On the basis of one major war every
twenty years—and discounting our Korean “police action” as a trifling event
which produced a piddling 25,000 dead American soldiers—the obvious conclusion
is that the twenty years are up. More and more often people comment, between
yawns or between a discussion of TV and the baseball scores, about the
inevitability of everyone aiming hydrogen missiles at everyone else and pushing
the buttons. There is apparently so much logic, so much basic good sense in
this solution for ending the Cold War tensions, that the subject of war is
actually a little boring. “Oh, man,” your friend says, swigging a cold beer,
“this next one’s going to be a lulu. We’re all going to be killed. Turn up the
TV, will you? I didn’t catch that last speech of Palladin’s.” No one,
apparently, is personally involved in the “next one,” which threatens to
eliminate the human species.
The attitude of the public toward
war is like that old Peter Arno cartoon, which shows a party of celebrating
people in an airplane. The airplane is just about to crash head-on into the
side of a mountain, and one of the women is saying, “My God, we’re out of gin.”
In the event that any of my readers
are in their teens and just itching for a nice war to start so that they can be
courageous and masculine war heroes, let me assure them that if war will prove
anything, it is the opposite, and that if you are subjected to enough terror
you will come apart at the seams like everyone else. There may be some
satisfaction in realizing that your whole platoon went psycho after 12 days of
combat and you didn’t go psycho until the 13th day, but let me assure you, this
victory is a hollow one, especially if you end up in a straitjacket, and upon
investigation it will probably come out that the reason you didn’t go psycho
until the 13th day was because you were punching a typewriter in the general’s
office 50 miles behind the lines.
Mill Run
By M.T. [Moritz
Thomsen]
Los Molinos Sun
In the Hollywood
version of combat that moment when the fliers are gathered together in the
ready room and told what target they will destroy is always a moment of high
drama. We used to watch these movies overseas and almost die laughing, filled
at the same time as we watched with a sense of profound disgust. Van Johnson
and a host of other curly-headed, bright-eyed, wiggly-hipped 4Fs commanded by
Spencer Tracy used to emerge from these briefings, having just been sentenced
to certain death, and do everything but stick small waving flags in their ears.
In the background a chorus of 3,000 joined with a couple of symphony orchestras
and swung into a rising crescendo of “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.”
Hooray!
In actuality, our briefing sessions
were dramatic but also sort of sordid. All of us, for instance, had a
superstitious dread of changing the clothes which had brought us back from our
first combat experience. I wore the same shirt for 27 missions without daring
to tempt fate and have it cleaned. By that time it was so black and stiff with
the accumulated sweat of several hundred hours of increasing terror that it
used to crack when I struggled into it. All of us had these blackened and
disintegrating shards of clothing, and the rabbit-foot talisman that was going
to save our lives. Gathering together in one small quonset hut was a
breath-taking experience, since we smelled like a medium-sized herd of
constipated goats.
In the front of the ready room,
hidden from view by a curtain when we entered, was a map of
For a couple of months it seemed we
did nothing but bomb
I actually can’t remember much about
being over the city; there are entire 15 and 20 minute periods that are gone
out of my life, periods when the brain shut up shop and I existed on a crazy
level of doing what had been drilled into me to do quite unconsciously.
One morning our group had its turn
at leading the Eighth Air Force over
I remember approaching
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Watermelons”
I tried to demonstrate last week that in the public’s mind
any self-respecting Mongolian idiot could raise hogs with the expectation of
making enough money in a year or so to retire for life to the isle of
This watermelon public is a minority
public, but a dedicated one. It lives under rocks, I think, most of the year,
appearing only at harvest time, when they show up on the edges of the melon
fields. They don’t want to just eat melons; they want to talk about them too.
They can look at a truck-load of melons and tell you which field they came out
of; they know the price of melons in
Not only does this minority public
attribute certain magical abilities, a devilish knowledge of spells and charms,
to the watermelon grower, but it tends to deify any man who claims a knowledge
of melons. You can really gain status with this group if you can tell the
difference between an over-ripe and a broken-heart.
“Come on up to the store with me and
help me pick out a watermelon,” the novice asks the expert, reverently, and a
new life-long friendship is born. And three hour later they will come back with
a great bulging, scabby beast of a melon which, like as not, is green as a
gourd, and about as tasty.
Have you ever noticed one of these
experts around a pile of melons? They are under a compulsion to pat each one as
though they were playing bongo drums. There is a certain religious beauty in
their concentration. They cock their heads, roll the eyes back so that only the
whites show, and start slapping. One melon goes “pong”; one goes “ping”; one
goes “poing”; one goes “gunk”. The “Gunk” one momentarily startles the expert
from his trance. He slaps it again and shakes his head mournfully.
My own personal opinion is that the
melon that goes “gunk” is every bit as good as the one that goes “poing.” The
best melon in the world would taste to me as though it has just been poured
through a horse, and I have never been able to understand why, with the bounty
of all creation at hand, the flavor of peaches and strawberries, of pineapples
and cherries, anyone could pretend to enjoy the insipidity of a watermelon
anyway.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Waves”
“I like Bob Ramsey,”
one of the young fellows on our watermelon chain-gang announced a while ago,
sort of a propos of nothing.
“Why?” I asked him in surprise, not
because liking Bob Ramsey is so amazing, but simply curious to know of Bob’s
sterling qualities had touched my young friend’s sensibilities.
“Because he waves at me,” he said.
This really stopped me, and when I
didn’t say anything he suddenly became defensive, almost hostile. “Oh, you
lousy Vina farmers,” he went on, dropping the biggest watermelon in the field
so that he could more freely wave his arms. “I’ve lived in Vina all my life,
worked for every farmer around here, and most of them won’t even see you on the
street.”
“Listen, young rat-face, catch the
melons, and stop screaming at me,” I told him. So he dropped the next two on
purpose just to show me who was boss, and the conversation ended. Melons were
worth about $30 a ton that day, and I figured out later that little tete-a-tete had cost me about 97 cents.
But it also had its consolations,
because I realized then that if waving at people in cars makes one popular then
I am probably the most popular kid in
I wave at everybody.
The trouble is that all cars look
pretty much the same to me as do pick-ups, and on the highway the situation is
completely confusing. Slim drives a red pick-up, so I wave at red pick-ups. Bob
Hoskins drives a country car; I wave at all country cars. Knute Anderson has a
pick-up with wrap-around rear windows. I don’t take any chances. Wrap-around
rear windows get the wave. Wycoff drives a police car, and I gravely salute all
police cars, hoping a little uneasily that I won’t be arrested for attempted
bribery or driving with one hand.
For three months last winter I waved
at all light green Ford pick-ups until I realized that theoretically I was
waving at myself.
I learned about the pleasures of
being waved at about four years ago while driving through
Since then I’ve played it safe. I
wave at gas trucks, meat-wagons, Fords, Chevies, everything but Cadillacs. No
one I know owns a Cadillac, and if farm prices don’t come up a little it looks
like I never will.
And everyone waves back except Mrs.
Hardy Carter and Marshall Boggs. I forgive Mrs. Carter because each time I pass
her she is gripping the wheel like death, and from the distraught expression on
her face I can tell she is expecting momentarily to plunge off the road. But as
for you, Boggs, I can’t understand it. I told you I’d pay.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Publishers’ dinner”
By M.T. [Moritz
Thomsen]
The way it all began was innocent
enough. Mr. Murphy, the publisher of the Sun,
insisted that I join him at dinner with a group of newspaper publishers for one
of their more or less regular meetings. Ever since I saw Ben Hecht’s “Front
Page” with Lee Tracey back in 1933 I have realized, of course, that
newspapermen were an eccentric lot, brash, uninhibited, vocal, and guided by
none of the bourgeois conceptions of respectability.
I went then, not expecting to enjoy
myself particularly, nor to fit into the group, but like an interested person
will watch a brain operation, to enlarge the foundation of my experience,
however unpleasant the experience might prove to be.
Well, one nice thing about
newspapermen, they don’t waste time in idle chitchat. Before our chair seats
were even warm someone had asked someone else that most profound of all
questions, “Why hath God put us on this earth?” The whole evening exploded into
a chaos of the deepest philosophic investigation.
Everyone wanted to talk; nobody
wanted to listen. It was a night straight out of Turgenev or Dostoyevski, let
me tell you. Within three minutes, with everyone yelling at once, it became
apparent, even to the members of the press, that some sort of order would have
to be maintained.
A chairman was appointed, but
unfortunately he was completely ignored, and in fact right after the soup
course, spent most of his time in the bar.
What gave the evening its
surrealistic overtones was the fact that all the publishers were in complete
agreement on almost everything, mainly that each of them wanted to leave the
world in a little better shape than they had found it. Why they were all
screaming like that escapes me.
Those of you who were there may
remember a strange hiatus about midway through the murky meal. Thinking of it
now reminds me of the eye of the cyclone, that unreal time as the center of the
storm moves over you and momentarily the sound and the fury dies.
You may remember that just about
then a woman near the end of the table began screaming at me. I believe she was
one of the party. What she said, as well as I can recall was, “Hey, you, you
stupid-looking jerk, you haven’t opened your stupid mouth all night; what are
your ideas, if any, about all this?”
What I said, and I certainly didn’t
mean to precipitate a crisis, simply was that Hitler and Stalin both wanted, in
their own ways, to leave the world a little better than they found it, and that
unless the newspapermen could be a little more explicit I found the
conversation meaningless.
The cyclone moved on.
I want to deny those rumors about
that grey-haired gentleman and me fighting out on the gravel; they are
completely false.
Later, to be completely honest, I
did invite that woman to step outside and wrestle, but I smiled when I said it,
and I guess she thought I wasn’t serious. Lucky for me, come to think of it;
she’d have beaten me to a pulp.
Well, I had my experience, and what
I learned was this: Newspaper publishers, without exception, have much nicer
wives than they deserve.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Fanatics”
A longshoreman in
According to this guy, Hoffer, the
world is crawling with fanatics, and luckily for us, most of them haven’t got
the power to do anything about it. A fanatic, Hoffer says, is a person with an
idea which greatly simplifies reality.
There’s a man over in Paskenta, for
instance, who mimeographed his philosophy and left a great stack of copies in
the Poultry Producer’s office for the public to read. He had everything figured
out. Why, this gentleman asked, are we all tense, miserable, nasty, hateful,
and sick? The same reason why chickens in cages are tense, miserable, nasty,
hateful and sick. They are loaded up with positive or negative ions (I don’t
remember which) that can’t be discharged. Wearing shoes is what put us in the
present jack-pot. To feel abundantly healthy again all we have to do is walk
around bare-footed for 30 minutes a day on good old damp mother earth. This is
a modern version of the Antaeus-Hercules legend. Remember?
Up until a year ago there was a man
in Vina who lived on figs, nuts, and chocolate bars and who believed, if my
sources can be trusted, that marriage was an unnatural condition if its
consummation took place more than once every seven years. He had been divorced,
I believe, some time back—about the time he began to figure things out for
himself.
I have been sitting here trying to
think of more fanatic examples, and suddenly I realized that the whole Los
Molinos-Vina area is simply lousy with screw-balls, with people who blame all
the troubles in the world on Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman, with people
who claim it hasn’t rained because the jet winds which trigger our weather at
the north pole are being deflected by all those airplanes stationed in Alaska,
with people who blame the atomic tests in the Southern Pacific or in Siberia on
either too much rain or not enough.
I know people who swear by
blackstrap molasses and yogurt, friends with fantastic cures for constipation,
old codgers who think the world is going to hell because—I’m not sure about
this argument—because either 1. a majority of the citizenry still believes in
God or 2. young men no longer protect their heads from the harmful rays of the
sun.
Is it like this everyplace? I hope
not; I hope our area is sort of a headquarters, sort of a last refuge for
eccentrics and screw-balls. Someday the country is going to need new ideas, and
if we can get all the fanatics together in
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Farmers laugh”
The easiest way to make a farmer laugh, I have discovered, is to tell him how disaster, large or small, has struck home to one of his neighbors. Since I know scarcely anyone who isn’t a farmer it is perhaps unwise to generalize, to the extent of saying that farmers are any more malicious than any other group, but from where I sit it often seems that way.
An old Frenchman, whose name I can’t
spell, said that there was an element of pleasure in the misfortunes of even
our best friends. I’ll bet if that old boy had met a few
In another part of the
paper a there is a report on Dalton Young and how one of his men threw a sack
of wrenches and bearings into his corn harvester. I have been listening to this
particular story now for the last 3 weeks, accompanied in the telling by
giggles, hee-haws, snorts, and slaps on the backs of farmers about to collapse
with the sheer joyous humor of the whole thing. In fact the story has been told
so much, so often, that I blush for the Sun,
which apparently still considers that it is telling its readers something new.
Harvester men, especially, fall over
backwards when they hear the story, and I don’t even go into Vina any more
because there is a harvester man there who stops me on the street, the tears
already streaming from his eyes, and gasps, “Tell me again how they threw the
bag of bearings into Young’s harvester.”
Remember the wind in September that
blew over half the prune trees in the county? Well, it’s an ill wind, etc., and
a lot of farmers who didn’t have prunes were walking around feeling good that
day.
But these disasters, the floods that
wipe out whole areas and kill whole herds of livestock, the winds that destroy
thousands of trees, are not really laughing matters. They simply generate a
nice feeling of satisfaction in the farmer, a sense of invulnerability, the
feeling, perhaps of the person at a funeral who gloats to himself, “There you
are, and here I am.”
It is always nice to know that the
bean crop failed in
There is a lot that could be said on
the subject, but suddenly it has become a little frightening so I think I’ll
stop with just one humorous little reference to the cranberry farmers of our
nation, who suddenly find themselves with hundreds of tons of cranberry sauce
10 days from Thanksgiving.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Hog shit I”
No date; handwritten
in notebook
A couple my devoted
readers who are also apparently confirmed Freudians have been pointing out to
me whenever we meet that they have deduced certain of my abnormal traits. “You
say such nasty things,” one of them told me the other day. “Why can’t you write
about nice things? Why are you always mentioning hog manure? You seen quite
obsessed with it, as though it were continually on your mind.”
Now, anyone who has spent over an
hour on my ranch, especially since the recent rains, and comes away without
being obsessed with hog manure, in fact positively scarred for life from the
full horror of the experience, is in my opinion the abnormal one. Yes, I’m
obsessed with hog manure all right. Not only is it continually on my mind, but
on any part of me you’d care to mention. At the moment it’s knee-deep on the
high ground. The low spots are as yet unplumbed.
This grotesque development, this
slowly creeping envelopment in hog by-products, is a direct consequence of my
own naïve tendency to believe what I read in the farm publications. About five
years ago Farm Journal, Farm Quarterly, and all the rest of them began pushing
the raising of hogs on concrete slabs. Every month they ran another big article
on the advantages of confinement, how much cheaper, quicker, and easier it was.
There were big color pictures of fat faced smiling farmers lolling around in
the shade counting their money while the hogs got fat. The hogs in the pictures
were so sleek and shiny that you had to squint to keep from being blinded by
the splendor of the scene. There wasn’t a solitary speck of dirt in the pens.
Under each picture was some insane caption like this: “Now hog farmer Jones
feeds 1,600 hogs and it only take him 3 minutes a month.”
These articles as the poured from
the presses went into every phase of confinement feeding, except one. They
forgot to mention that a mature hog, in a year’s time, will produce 5 tons of
waste products. This figure is from a government bulletin and I’m not prepared
to argue with it, though my own feeling is that it is immoderately
conservative. On certain depressing days I am prepared to swear that one of my
normal swaggering, nasty little hogs, after having swung into high gear and
full production, can manufacture about a ton an hour, day in and day out.
I read the articles and studied the
pictures, sort of substituting my own smiling face for farmer Jones’, and it
all sounded so great that I finally called Mr. Starnes in Gerber and asked him
to start hauling Ready-mix.
Five years later the farm magazines
have finally begun running articles on the disposal of what I have been talking
about. The biggest problem in confinement feeding of hogs, they point out, is
the problem of manure disposal. As though I didn’t know. The full page color
pictures show how it is done. The same smiling farmers, pushing buttons on
enormous electrical panels, set into motion $50,000 worth of gears, paddles,
belts, augers, and endless chains and the stuff is whisked away to a 15 acre
lake which you can see in the distance. Upon it in a bright red dinghy
especially hauled in for the picture sit his happy, smiling children fishing
for crappies. At least I feel it reasonable to assume that’s what they’re
fishing for.
In the meantime, back at the ranch.
A couple of years ago, when the full
horror of my situation began breaking in on me, I started digging pits in front
of all my pens, which would, I hoped, hold a week’s supply. They were dug in a
sort of wild desperation, and as it turned out they held about a 20-minute
supply. They still sit there, full to overflowing, a monument to my unwarranted
optimism.
Last week a very
dignified elderly woman drove onto the ranch. She got out of her car and walked
toward me. Between us was the pit. My vocal chords must have been paralyzed,
because I simply stood there, hypnotized, as she stepped into it and, with
great dignity, like a proud warship with all flags flying, began slowly to sink
from sight.
That was one depth
that got plumbed, and in case anyone is interested in how deep the manure pit
is in front of the farrowing house, I can tell them with some degree of
precision that it is about belly-button high on someone’s average-sized
grandmother.
And I can tell you one other thing.
Somewhere in this immediate area, there is a sweet white-haired old lady in a
rocking chair, and she is rocking and thinking, rocking and thinking. She is
thinking about that day. I’m not the only one around here who is obsessed with
hog manure.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Hog shit II”
On the very same day
that sweet old lady marched bravely into my manure pit a couple of other
gruesome events took place on the premises that I might as well report now and
get it over with. When the history of this ranch comes to be written that
Tuesday will probably be known as “ladies day,” because contrary to the usual
custom, all serious casualties that day were females.
The entire day, thought about now in
retrospect, takes on the trappings of a low-grade slapstick comedy. Mack
Sennett should have been there with his cameraman. My visitors had the whole
book thrown at them, and they were hit by everything but custard pies.
By 6 that evening, what with the
rain, Champlin Slough had raised about 12 feet and I was, I thought, since I
lived on one side of the slough and the rest of the world on the other, safely
isolated from mankind.
In the afternoon, shortly after I
had turned the hose on that old lady and sent her home, two high school boys
and the publisher of the Sun, in
three distinct attempts at crossing the slough, had met with disaster. The
trouble some people will go through to interrupt one of my naps is
unbelievable, but there is also something unbelievable about waking from three
different naps to see newspaper publishers and small boys floating past your
house flailing their arms and churning up white water.
Well, in the interest of truth, I’d
better confess that this is a slight exaggeration. Actually, Larry Martin is
the only one who went completely under, and he didn’t really float past the
house waving his arms. The reason he didn’t float past the house was because he
got caught in some cottonwood branches from a tree that had fallen across the
slough and this sort of checked him momentum.
Anyway, by 6 it was dark and the
slough had cut me off from this mad activity, and the horrors of that day, I
thought, were over and done with. I changed into dry clothes, put the
artificial resuscitator back in the closet and cooked dinner.
At
Because it wasn’t laughter that I
heard, it was short screams of terror and cries for help from a couple of
confused females.
What had happened while I was
cooking dinner was that fate, in one of its more sadistic moods, had arranged
that two girls, southbound on 99-E, should run out of gas by my mailbox. In the
darkness the ranch looked just like any other ranch; all they could see was the
peaceful old lane wandering down to a peaceful old barn.
It probably is impossible to reconstruct
their emotions as they strolled down that lane to find themselves, with each
step, going a little deeper into mud and whatnot. If emotions are hard to
reconstruct, however, it was comparatively easy to reconstruct their trail the
next morning, especially after those 10 hungry sows began following them around
for a handout, and the girls started running so suddenly that their shoes came
off.
There were naked footprints
plastered all over the yard and their trail looked like one of those
eight-cushion shots in a championship billiard game, as they veered around sows
and bounced off fences.
At one point, in order to escape
from the 10 sows, they had leaped a fence and landed in a pen with 60 fat hogs.
I’ll wager there were some fancy yips going on about then.
Well, by the time I got over there,
about
What I can’t understand is the last
look they gave me before driving off, a look of sheer outrage and animal
hatred. You’d think I had invited them in to tour the hog lot.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“I want out”
Last Friday afternoon during the first wet hours of the last storm that finally began soaking our fields, I was a witness to one of those unsung, mostly unnoticed dramas which serve to illustrate the essential invincibility of the human spirit. It was a truly inspiring and emotional experience. The alcoholic who abjures his spirits, and the dope addict who breaks with his vice illustrate these same qualities of strength and recuperation, but in a less dramatic form. The transformation I witnessed, that change in a man from an abject, whipped creature to a soul triumphant, shaking his fists at heaven, took scarcely five minutes.
On second thought, this story may
not prove that man may be destroyed but never beaten, but more cynically, that
farmers are insane.
As though that needed proving.
A farmer friend of mine that I run
into a couple times a week visited the ranch Friday afternoon, and we waded,
hip-deep through what we refer delicately on the hog ranch as mud, to the house
and made some coffee. For the last year we have been carrying on agricultural
conversations very much like the ones I have with Knudt Anderson, sad defeated
investigations into the bleak outlook for farm commodities. The big difference
is, though, that my friend’s thinking is almost formulaic. He suffers from a
verbal tic whenever the future is discussed. “I want out out out,” he
invariably cries when the spring planting is mentioned.
As far as my friend has been
concerned for a year there will be no spring planting, no more ridiculous
efforts, defeated before they begin, to wrest a profit from the soil.
We sat at the table drinking coffee
while my friend listlessly thumbed through the latest copy of the Farm Journal.
“Did you read the article in there
about solid planted corn?” I asked him. “It might be worth a try.”
“Nuts,” my friend said. “I just want
out out out.” He speaks these words very fast with the timbre of his voice
rising to an hysterical pitch until it sounds sad, like a bird cry.
We sat there drinking coffee and watching the rain, and finally my friend said in a very bored voice, “Here’s that article you mentioned.” He read it.
Now what the article is about is some
experiments
I watched my friend read this
article and all of a sudden I heard a curious little sound; it was the gears
turning in his head. “Say, this fascinating, isn’t it?” he said, the blood
beginning to flush into his face, new life coursing through his veins. He
grabbed a pencil and began covering the table with figures. His hands had begun
to tremble slightly.
I retired for a moment to make
another pot of coffee, and my friend’s voice followed me. He wasn’t talking to
me; he was simply thinking out loud. “Now, I sort of visualize this as a
feeding operation,” he said. “Let’s see now. On 100 acres, 6 cows and calves to
the acre,” scribble scribble scribble. “Say a net of $400 an acre, that’s
$40,000 an acre, and you take that money and put in 400 acres and the next year
net $180,000.”
He studied the article again,
snorted with disgust and wrote more figures on the table. “They didn’t ever
fertilize,” he said. “We’ll pour 600 pounds of nitrogen per acre on that field
and double our yields. No, let’s be conservative. Say we only net $75,000 the
first year…”
The transformation was complete. My
friend was a farmer again, and I’ll bet he wont’ be screaming “I want out out
out” for another 10 months.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Monkeys”
Los Molinos Sun,
Dear Mr. Editor:
One of the funniest
stories I ever read was about the scientist who wanted to prove the law of
averages. He had studied a statistic that if you put a monkey at a typewriter
and he typed long enough, eventually he would write something that made sense.
A visitor to his laboratory is shown into a special room, where, at a long
table, a whole row of monkeys, about 30 of them, each before his own typewriter
and each wearing a green eye-shade, is busily pecking away. One of them is
typing the complete works of Dickens. Another, as they watch behind his back,
finishes the last sentence of The Pillar
of Wisdom, put a new sheet into the machine, and begins to type Crime and Punishment, Chapter One. And
so on down the line. Each monkey is typing without error one of the classics.
Until I began writing for your rag I
had always believed that this story was purely imaginative, a piece of sheer fantasy.
But lately I am becoming more and more convinced that the author of that story
must have personally known some newspaper editor who actually employed a monkey
or a wild ape to be used in an emergency at the typesetting machine. I now feel
that I know who this editor is.
There is only one thing I resent
about this wild ape of yours, sir. Why do you only let him out of his cage when
it is time to set up my contribution to your paper? I am, for instance,
competing against two other columnists—the mysterious Dairyville Farmer’s Wife
and Mr. Dave Minch. I jealously study this copy and with increasing rancor note
that their sentences are reproduced with all the clarity of a mountain stream,
while my copy comes out so muddied and transformed that I often have to refer
to my own original notes to see what it is I was trying to say.
For example, if I were to write down
that uproariously funny joke—Who was that lady I saw you with last night? That
was no lady, that was my wife—the chances are that the next time I read it in
your paper it would look something like this:
SQUEAK SQUAWK
Now, having a wild ape who can come
even this close to reproducing the written word is a rare and wonderful thing,
and I’m not for a moment suggesting that you substitute a live human being. I
am only requesting, sir, an even break with the other contributors to your
sheet. Would it not be possible to turn your creature loose on the Farmer’s
Wife and on Mr. Minch’s column, too? I believe that this would be the
democratic way and that I could more fairly compete if we were all reduced to
meaninglessness together.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Music”
About 20 years ago,
back in the days of the 78 rpm phonograph record, RCA Victor decided, in the
interest of culture and increased dividends, to start pushing classical music.
In its advertising campaign which kicked off this large scale entry into the
realm of spiritual values and which was also calculated to shame the American
public into buying good music, it listed the 10 greatest masterpieces and
asked, “How many of these records do you have in YOUR home?”
Now, after 20 years,
it is almost impossible to remember this dogmatic and monumental list in its
entirety, but the very idea that someone could with godlike certitude enlighten
us on such matters was so breathtaking at the time that most of the titles,
surprisingly, still fester in the brain. Here are some of RCA Victor’s nominees
for immortality: Finlandia and Valse Triste by Sibelius, Ferde Grofe’s Grand
Canyon Suite, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, a six-minute excerpt from the last
act of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde—a four-hour opera from which Victor had
extracted the really significant moments—Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Strauss’
Blue Danube waltz, The Stars and Stripes Forever by old what’s-his-name, and
I’m jiggered if I can remember the rest of them, but they all came up to this
same electrifying standard.
According to the
advertising campaign, this well-rounded and exciting selection was the
foundation, the very guts, of a record library. All you had to do was add a
red-labeled record every month or so and within a year you would positively
stink with culture and refinement and your home would be headquarters for the intelligentsia.
I have been pondering
the author of this list for 20 years, and there still remain only two
possibilities. It came either from the inventory department, who discovered
with horror that they were calamitously overloaded with unsold albums with the
above titles, or it was invented by someone who hated classical music and had
decided to so flood the American public with the banal and sleep-provoking that
they would turn once more and forever to Glenn Miller, Ted Fiorito, Guy
Lombardo, and such ilk.
It must be impossible
to imagine a list more beautifully calculated to reinforce an uninformed
public’s conviction that classical music is from Yawnsville and better ignored
in one’s private life than this list unless possibly they had included To a
Wild Rose or In a Monastery Garden rendered on the Mormon Tabernacle Organ with
the choir humming softly in the background.
This list, I think,
set good music back at least 50 years. It was about the time of its publication
that radio stations one by one all over the nation began eliminating classical
music from their programming. Now with the exception of three of four radio
stations operating on the brink of disaster in a couple of places (New York and
the Bay area) where large numbers of thoughtful, civilized, and music-loving
people congregate there isn’t a radio station in the nation that has the guts
or the imagination to play anything more stimulating than a symphonic version
of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine.”
The only exception
that I know of is a
Local stations are
perfect examples of what happens when radio stations pimp to the public taste;
or what they think is the public taste. From the time they go on the air we are
regaled with a steady regurgitation of hillbilly music for us farmer rubes, and
then from
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Pasteurized prunes”
Dear Mrs. George
Lindauer:
Thanks very much for
the package of pasteurized prunes and the copy of a speech which you and a Mrs.
John Mohler delivered this summer, apparently, judging from its content, to a
pack of advertising men who make their livings trying to make the public
prune-conscious.
Unfortunately, your gifts raised
more questions than they solved, and since this is a prune area I think it
might be interesting to get these questions out in the open.
Now, about that speech, Mrs.
Lindauer, let’s get that one out of the way first. I have been trying to
visualize the mechanics of it, and since there were two of you involved, it
would appear on the surface to be completely impossible.
Did you take turns delivering this
speech, a sentence at a time, or were you both talking at once like a bunch of
women at a bridge table? Did one of you talk while the other one danced? Or was
one of you, perhaps, skipping back and forth across the stage dipping into a
gunny-sack full of pasteurized prunes and flinging them by the handful into the
faces of the advertising men? Glamorizing prunes seems impossibly difficult
without some farmer’s wife antagonizing these people who, after all, you are
paying to transmit to the public a portion of their hysterical enthusiasm.
From the tone of the speech I rather
lean to the idea that one of you spoke and the other one simply stood there
glaring at the audience. However it was handled, I’m sure you will admit that
it must have been a sordid and demoralizing spectacle, one which could not
under any circumstances advance the interests of the prune industry.
The package of prunes was delicious.
I ate most of them yesterday driving back to the ranch from our pleasant visit,
took a good dose of Pepto-Bismol this morning, and think everything will be
fine in a day or two. It was my own fault, and I’m not blaming you a bit.
But I do want to comment on what I
feel is an unfortunate name for this new product. The word “pasteurized” has
tremendous implications in the public’s mind with the killing of germs, and as
I devoured your package of goodies there was a whole area of horror in the back
of my mind as I considered what I had been eating all my life until this
moment.
UNpasteurized prunes? Heaven forbid.
I think the prune people stuck their necks out too far this time. As far as I’m
concerned, anyway, if I can’t find a pasteurized prune, the basic laws of
hygiene will drive me right back to my good old canned peaches and applesauce.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Pitfalls”
(Notebook version)
The hog business has many pitfalls and many disagreeable features which are discussed at length in the farm magazines, but I have never seen any mention in any publication of what is really the most disagreeable, the most hard to cope with feature of them all. The particular cross that the hog man must bear was one I thought quite unique to the business until I became involved with Slim in a field of watermelons and found that the same conditions prevailed.
I am speaking of the
casual, uninvited visitor to your ranch who tells you how to run your business.
Everyone, absolutely everyone has at some time or another owned an old sow. If
they haven’t owned one they used to spend the summer with Uncle Ernie who did.
There is something depraved, something blood-curdling about the depth of detail
which my guests can dredge up from their childhood past about grandpaw’s sow
named Rosie or that little gilt at Aunt Jenny’s who farrowed 17 pigs under the
peach tree. What a curious relationship must have existed that the details
remain so fresh.
Now the terrible thing about this is
that owning or knowing that old sow has turned my visitors into swine experts.
They shake their heads in disapproval and tell me how to get straightened out.
I have been advised to feed my sows mashed potatoes, lye, coal, pink beans, and
Ivory soap. One guy insisted that I cut all the tails off my baby pigs, came
back a week later, found that I hadn’t, and drove off in a dander; I haven’t
seen him since. Perfect strangers will drive into the ranch and just about die
laughing because the baby pigs are sleeping under heat lamps or because I’m not
feeding them cottage cheese like cousin Lem did back in ’07.
A while back one of the temporary
mosquito abatement men would drive in 4 or 5 times a week in his little Jeep. I
thought at first he was looking for mosquito larvae, but it turned out he was
looking for sick pigs. I think it was some sort of an insane obsession; the sad
truth is that he could almost always find one either sick or dead, and his
reactions day after day were identical. First he would hunt me down wherever I
was, approach me with a dead march step, face grey, eyes averted, tell me what
was happening on the ranch, and then announce that I had cholera. I used to
hide in the grain bin when I saw him coming, and then he quit or got
transferred or went back to
One of my off the ranch experts is a
truck driver who has breakfast at the J & J. What we have in common is an
awareness of the downward trend in the hog market, though our reactions are not
exactly identical. I swear he sits at the counter swilling gallon upon gallon
of coffee waiting for me to come in so that he can greet me with, “Boy, hogs
just ain’t worth nothin’ today, are they?” and as he says it, over his face
spreads a grin of such diabolic glee that makes my blood run cold. Wonder what
I ever did to him?
(Published version)
Any fool knows how to
raise hogs. A few ears of corn, some table scraps, a nice mud hole, and man,
you’re in business. I thought for a while this knowledge was instinctual or at
the least absorbed at the mother’s breast. Science, however, tell us this is
impossible.
Today we will discuss the worst
feature of the hog business. It is not the smell, the problem of disease or
nutrition; it is not being eaten alive by a sow with litter. No, I am speaking
of the casual uninvited visitor to your ranch who tells you what you are doing
wrong. Compared with this problem, being eaten alive by a sow with litter is
like a two-week vacation with pay.
Everyone who comes on the ranch,
absolutely everyone has at some time or another owned an old sow. If they
haven’t owned one they used to spend the summer with Uncle Ernie who did. There
is something depraved, something truly unnatural about the depth of detail
which my guests can dredge up from the childhood past about grandpaw’s sow
named Rosie or that little gilt at Aunt Jenny’s who farrowed 17 pigs under the
peach tree. What a curious, heart-rending relationship must have existed that
the details remain so fresh. And why did they always have 17 pigs? What, I keep
asking myself, is the Freudian significance of the number 17?
But the terrible thing about this is
that owning or knowing that old sow has turned my visitors into “Swine
Experts.” Their mouths are flapping before the dust has settled or their car
door slammed. In 17 seconds they are shaking their heads in disapproval and
telling me how to get straightened out. I have been advised to feed my sows on
exclusive diets of mashed potatoes, almond hulls, lye, coal, pink-beans, and
pig iron. A handful of Duz in the drinking water was suggested to make the hair
shiny. One guy rushed in one day, insisted that I cut all the tails off my baby
pigs, came back a week later, found that I hadn’t and drove off in a huff.
Perfect strangers will appear in the
hog house already half-dead from laughter because the baby pigs are sleeping
under heat lamps or because I’m not feeding them cottage cheese like cousin Lem
did back in the Ozarks.
One summer the temporary mosquito
abatement man began coming to the ranch every day in his Jeep. I thought at
first he was looking for mosquito larvae, but it turned out he was looking for
sick pigs. I think it was some sort of an insane obsession. He would always
find me wherever I was, look at me as though there had just been a death in the
family and ask, “Cholera?” This, apparently, was the only word he knew that had
anything to do with hogs. I used to hide in the grain bin when I saw him coming
and then he quit, or got transferred or went back to
One of my off the ranch experts is a big fat truck driver who has breakfast at the J and J. All that we have in common is an awareness of the downward trend in the hog market, though our reactions to the catastrophic situation are not exactly identical. I swear he sits at the counter swilling gallon upon gallon of coffee waiting for me to come in so that he can greet me with, “Boy, oh boy, fat hogs sure went down yesterday, didn’t they?” And as he says it, over his face spreads a grin of such malevolent and diabolic glee that my blood runs cold. Wonder what I ever did to him?
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Ethics”
In possession of
Rashani Rea
In the past 15 years
that I have lived in
Maybe not a great
many, but a few. They are the type of men who lend to their community a certain
sense and feeling of permanence and decorum. They are the ones who don’t cuss
in front of women, who wouldn’t dream of lying to you or cheating you in a
business deal. They are the ones who end up on thankless little committees
working for the community. They believe in God; a few of them even go to
church.
There is something
terribly illogical about the basic thinking of these men, however, which I
would like to bring to the public’s attention, and that is the fact that these
good farmers who live with virtue and righteousness thing nothing at all of
railroad ties from the Southern Pacific. It’s as though God’s commandment to
Moses really read, “Thou shalt not steal, except it is OK from the railroad
company.”
Now don’t get the idea
I am condemning farmers who steal railroad ties. As a matter of fact, I’m
highly in favor of it, and steal them at every opportunity whether I need them
or not. It is just one of those acquisitive traits that a man picks up, and
which ultimately turns into a vice that takes possession of him. I steal
railroad ties because I hate waste, because they’re free, and because it’s more
fun sneaking around stealing them than it is to have them given to me. I have
enough cached away now, figuring conservatively, to last me well into 1993.
But the real reason I
steal railroad ties is because of a deep subconscious conviction that any
company which will allow engineers to blow their whistles as much as the engineers
do, rolling past my ranch, ought to have their railroad ties stolen. And the
rails as well, as far as I’m concerned. And if someone has any use for the
trains, that’s OK too.
The company has one
mad idiot on the payroll who blows “Shave-and-a-haircut—six bits” every time he
rumbles past my house pulling his 100 square-wheeled freight cars behind him.
Why he’s got it in for me, I’ll never figure out. Surely he’s not mad because
I’m not out there waving at him, is he? Especially
considering that he goes by at
But before I got
derailed, I was discussing the inconsistencies in the honest men of this area
who see no incongruity in calling themselves Christians and thieves in the same
breath. It is one of the few incongruities, perhaps, that can be mentioned
without running the danger of receiving a bucketful of irate mail from the
irate preachers of the area.
I was lucky enough to
overhear two of Vina’s church-going, all-American boy types plotting one of
their raids last fall. The most interesting feature of their conversation was
the revelation in them of fully-developed, completely criminal minds. If that
pair wanted to expand, they could knock over every Bank of America branch
office in the territory without leaving a clue. They ended up, I discovered
later, with about 200 ties, which should last them for at least 75 years, in a
state of complete exhaustion, crouching down in the very middle of a private
hedge, giggling like six-year-olds in a state of suspended terror because they
had passed Albert Apperson in his sheriff’s car.
Afraid of Albert
Apperson? I wonder where he hides his
railroad ties?
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Ethics II”
[Clipping]
Last week I pointed
out how otherwise honest men felt an alarming lack of compunction about robbing
Southern Pacific of their railroad ties. On the contrary, they steal them by
the hundreds when all they actually need is one or two corner posts.
But this is small
potatoes. It is merely finger exercises in preparation for the big virtuoso
performances of middle age. Stealing ties is sort of a beginning exercise for
the young farmer interested in criminally assaulting the railroad company. We
have to turn to the older community leaders for those breathtakingly conceived
and faultlessly executed financial raids into the Southern Pacific money-box.
After all, railroad ties are heavy and extremely unwieldy and as a farmer moves
into the middle years he becomes not only lazier but greedier.
All of us who have
larceny in our hearts against Southern Pacific revere the memory of a certain
Vina farmer who is now pleasantly retired and who is, for all I know, living
out his declining years on the black sand beaches of Tahiti.
From the most humble
beginnings (I believe it was only four lambs) he advanced within a period of
less than eight years to a position of undisputed pre-eminence in his field.
His specialty was arranging on the first foggy night of each year to have a
band of sheep placidly strolling up that narrow area between the two steel
rails, and it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Slim Harbour was with
our leader that day many years ago when he received his first claim check from
Southern Pacific. It was a real moment of truth, Slim says, a moment of deep
reverence as the larcenous possibilities opened up before that farmer’s eyes.
What a look of dedication must suddenly have taken possession of his face. We
must thank Slim for preserving his first exact words which concisely describe
his entire later expanded activities.
For the sake of
brevity we have excised the dirty words. “Slim,” he said, “I’ll be a censored
censored censored. I lost four lambs, put in a claim for 20, and I might just
has well have put in a claim for 40.”
There’s a whole
philosophy of life for you in a nutshell.
Space does not permit
us to mention the many refinements in technique which have developed since that
momentous day, the filing of claims, for instance, for the loss of registered,
imported seed stock rather than for ordinary herd animals. It is enough to
point out once more that our leader was one of the few farmers who, through his
genius, was able to retire, one of the few who didn’t have to slave in his
fields until the day he dropped.
A superficial estimate
of the situation might lead one to believe that a primary prerequisite of
earning this additional outside income (and God knows in these hard times a
farmer needs a little outside income) is to own land contiguous to the railroad
right-of-way. This is not necessarily the case. One local farmer, in the early
fifties, brought off one of his more brilliant strokes one foggy night in May
when he lost 17 head of registered imported
Almost all, not all,
but almost all Southern Pacific employees can arrive at the number of dead cows
on a right-of-way by counting the legs and dividing by four. Sheep is another
matter. Examining the wool off a few old gummers judiciously spread along a
mile or so of track and you would think Don Quixote himself had spent the night
there battling the forces of evil.
It is our present
leader who has shown up graphically [clipping ends here]
[Notebook version,
hand-written]
Last week I pointed
out how otherwise honest men feel absolutely no moral compunctions about
robbing Southern Pacific of their railroad ties. On the contrary, they steal
them by the truckload, piling them up by the hundreds when all they actually
need is one or two corner posts.
But this is small
potatoes. Stealing ties is sort of a beginning exercise for the young farmer
interested in criminally assaulting the rail road company. We have to turn to
the older community leaders for those faultlessly executed and breathtakingly
conceived financial raids into the Southern Pacific moneybox. After all,
railroad ties are heavy and extremely unwieldy and as a farmer moves into the
middle years he becomes not only lazier but greedier.
All of us who have
larceny in our hearts against Southern Pacific revere the memory of a certain
Vina farmer who is now pleasantly retired and who is, for all I know, living
out his declining years on the black sand beached of Tahiti.
From the most humble
beginnings (I believe it was only four lambs) he advance within a period of
less than 10 years to a position of undisputed pre-eminence in his field. His
specialty was arranging, on the first foggy night of each year, to have a band
of sheep placidly strolling up that narrow area between the 2 steel rails, and
it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Slim Harbour was with
our leader that day many years ago when he received his first check from
Southern Pacific. It was a really moment of truth, Slim says, a moment of deep
reverence as the larcenous possibilities opened up before that farmer’s eyes.
We must thank Slim for preserving his first exact words which concisely
describe his entire later expanded activities.
For the sake of
brevity we have excised the dirty words: “Slim,” he said, “I’ll be a consored
censored censored. I lost four lambs, put in a claim for 40, and I might just
as well have put in a claim for 400.”
Space does not permit
us to mention the many refinements in technique which have developed since that
momentous day, the filing of claims, for instance, for the loss of registered
imported seed stock rather than for just ordinary herd animals. It is enough to
point out that our leader was one of the few farmers who, through his genius,
was able to retire, one of the few who didn’t have to slave in his fields until
the day he dropped.
A superficial estimate
of the situation might lead one to believe that a primary prerequisite of
earning this additional outside income (and God knows, in these hard days a
farmer needs a little outside income) is to own land contiguous to the railroad
right-of-way. This is not necessarily the case. Earl [illegible—Foor?] in the
early fifties brought off one of his more brilliant strokes one foggy night in
May when he lost 17 head of registered imported Hereford cows on the tracks. At
that time his ranch was at least a mile from Southern Pacific. Who but a man of
the sheerest imaginative talents could have anticipated fog in May? This is the
stuff of greatness, although in all fairness it must be pointed out that one of
the basic laws was broken when cows were used instead of sheep. Almost, not
all, but almost all Southern Pacific employees can arrive at the number of dead
cows on a right-of-way by counting the legs and dividing by four. But spread
the wool off a few old gummers judiciously placed along a mile or so of track
and you would think Don Quixote himself had spent the night there battling the
forces of evil.
It is our present
leader, John Roach of the Rumiano ranch, who has shown us that free enterprise
still lives in our great county. His brilliant coup of five years ago, when he
ran an old D-4 Caterpillar tractor directly in the path of an oncoming freight,
broadened the whole concept of larceny for all of us. Now, not only can we
profitably dispose of our worn out livestock, but our worn-out equipment, as
well.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“George Harris”
No date, no clipping,
unfinished
Handwritten in
notebook in possession of Rashani Rea
The day that 17 head
of Earl Foor’s cows got hit by a south-bound freight down near Henry Ballard’s
was quite a day around my ranch. To point up its drama and pathos, however,
I’ll have to give you a little family background and a short history of
My sister and her
husband, George Harris, happened to be visiting me that weekend. I didn’t know
it until years later, but it was a time of crisis for them, a time when they
were questioning the whole direction their lives seemed to be taking. My
brother-in-law George was an artist and a very good one. For 20 years he had
served an apprenticeship, learning his craft and developing individual painting
style. At that time he was one of the best abstract painters in
Now no one but a person with either a strong
streak of masochism or a true dedication to his art will select serious
painting as his life’s work. I think it was Art
News magazine who pointed out that there were less than 50 painters in the
entire
But George, it seemed
for a while, was going to be one of the lucky ones. He had found abstract
painting 20 years before the public, and by 1947 George’s paintings were
hanging in the museums and fighting it out with the best of them. By that time
95% of all the painting being done in the Bay area was abstract, and 90% of
that, extremely ill advised.
George’s work was
thoughtful and complex; he seemed to be commenting optimistically on man’s
capacity to hold divergent and simultaneous ideas in his head. It was quiet and
intellectual painting, or at least as intellectual as abstract painting can be.
And he had begun, finally, to be recognized as one of the few outstanding
painters.
About that time
something happened to painting that a lot of people are still trying to figure
out. Some young hot-bloods entered the scene. They were, perhaps, GIs who had
suffered the restrictions of army life too long, been too long repressed but
they began to paint and they threw out all the rules. Down with the discipline
of painting they cried, down with learning the techniques. All that matters is
the emotion, and the spattered the canvas with gobs of paint and they used
6-inch wide brushes, and they attacked, and everything was Big.
Before anyone realized
it 95% of all the work being done in the Bay area was “Expressionistic” and
abstract painting was looked at in its historical perspective along with
Impressionism, pointillism, Surrealism, and all the rest.
In 1950 George was an
historical figure, and if anyone was buying paintings, it wasn’t abstract
paintings.
We now come to the
morning that Earl’s cows tangled with Southern Pacific. The three of us were
quietly eating our mush when [end of writing]
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Beatniks”
I have been relaxing
this evening over a package of PASEURIZED prunes (at least that’s what it says
on the package) and reading a clever and very malicious article in Life magazine about the Beatniks, those
curious and malignant rebels who are congregating in our largest cities. The
whole tone of the article is so vicious and condemning that it puzzled me until
I realized that Life magazine, whose
income is derived from advertising, must, of necessity, be outraged by an
segment of our society that scorns the products of our society, and which in a
broad sense, ceases to consume.
This apparently is what the Beats
are doing. On the whole, they are loutish creatures who disapprove of work. As
a consequence they seldom have the funds to buy kitchen gadgets, those shiny
chrome-plated symbols of success which fill American homes. Their theory seems
to be that they can be as miserable and unhappy without a 1960 refrigerator as
anyone else can be with one.
What makes the Beatniks outcasts and
traitors to the American dream? It is not the marijuana smoking, the
overindulgence in vino, their propensity to pass life away in fruitless and
meaningless conversation, or the absence of a marriage license framed above the
conjugal bed. What makes them evil and dangerous is simply the fact that they
won’t buy our nice, new products.
Sin, according to a group of goofy
definitions that I heard the other day, is whatever your society says it is. In
the past we allowed the church to make up the rules, but lately, and more and
more we have handed over the power of defining sin to the advertising people.
Look at T.V. for 30 nights in a row and I’ll guarantee that you’d rather be
caught red-handed in an adulterous affair than be accused of having bad breath.
Smoke-stained teeth or armpit stain
is becoming equated with armed robbery or bestiality. A man isn’t supposed to
smell like a man any more; he’s supposed to smell like a rose bush, and if you
don’t drive a new car, or aren’t seriously considering mortgaging your soul for
one, you are just about as seditious as Captain Nolan who cried in a moment of
folly, “Damn the United States,” and was sentenced to be forever a man without
a country.
We are a nation of consumers—the
largest, most wasteful, most extravagant people in the history of the world. A
Chinese would grow fat on what each of us throws in the garbage pail, but what
is so dangerous is that our existence is beginning to hinge on the wastefulness
and folly of our consumption.
Imagine what would happen, for
instance, if everyone in the country decided to drive his present car for one
more year. Detroit and Flint, Michigan, would disappear off the face of the
earth, as though hit by hydrogen bombs; the denizens of Madison Avenue and the
poll takers would be clawing at one another’s throats like wolves, and the
chaos would spread so rapidly that the Russians could probably make an
unopposed landing on the east coast.
What scares me is that industry is
becoming so complicated and so interrelated that the same thing might happen
if, for example, the American people as a group decided to stop buying
toothpicks.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Bull sale”
Longhand, from
notebook
The trouble with the
following story is that it probably shouldn’t be written down for another 25
years; by that time the tale will have become an authentic part of our local
folklore. Too many people around here already know it now, the actual numbers
of animals involved, the actual sum of money. I don’t remember these little
details so I’m just making them up, feeling that they are relatively
unimportant. Never let it be said that ignorance prevented me from plunging
ahead.
Anyway.
Back in our dear dead days, about 10
or 15 years ago, the Red Bluff Bull Sale was quite a different event than it is
now. Unbelievable as this may sound, its main purpose was to sell bulls. There
were no dancing girls, no high-priced comedians, no hoop-dee-doo. It was
primarily a local event attracting local people and everyone at the sale knew
everyone else. One thing was the same, however—everyone had a couple more
highballs that day than he would normally have had.
Except our hero, a cattleman proudly
claimed by both Vina and Los Molinos, who had had so many extra drinks that he
awoke the next morning after the sale with no memory of having been there. He
was lying fully clothed in a room at the Tremont, being watched over by a
solicitous wife, when reality returned.
“Wow!” our hero said.
“You can say that again,” his wife
said, sadly.
“Wow,” our hero said.
Unfortunately, I was not present at
this moment in the cattleman’s life, probably, as you will presently see, the
most dramatic moment he ever experienced, so I’m making up the conversation,
too. It must have gone roughly like this:
“The bull sale’s all over, huh?”
“Yes, dear, it’s all over.”
“Well, darn, wish I’d been there.”
“Oh, you were there, honey, you were
there.”
“Oh, I was? It’s all sort of hazy.
How did it go? How much did the bulls bring?”
“They went very well, dear. Matter
of fact, they set a new high, around a 600-dollar average.”
“Gee, it’s a shame I was under the
weather. I sure wanted to get one of those bulls.”
“Well, don’t feel bad about it, honey. You did get the one you wanted. As a matter of fact, you bought them all.”
As I said, this happened 10 or 15 years ago,
and perhaps I am exaggerating a little. Maybe our cattleman didn’t buy them
all, maybe only 90 percent. For the sake of the story let’s assume that he
awoke that morning with 40 600-dollar bulls. Whatever the actual figure was, he
was obviously the largest bull man in
The next day when he was fit to
travel he left
“Well, how did it go, dear? Did you
get rid of the bulls?”
“Yes, sweetheart, I got rid of every
bull.”
“Thank heavens for that. Did you get
your money back?”
“Well, now, you know the cow men are
having a rough time up there this year, with the weather and all. They just
haven’t got any money.”
“And so, sweetheart?”
“So I traded bulls, honey. I got
2-for-1. Now I’ve got 80 bulls.”
What a shame the story can’t simply
end there.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Christmas I”
I think that hardly anyone over 20 years of age has much of anything good to say about Christmas. From about age 20 Christmas ceases to be a money-making proposition. At about that age for every dollar you spend on presents you get about a dollar back, and you end up the Yuletide season in a slightly weaker condition than when you started, having received from various aunts and cousins a variety of insane gifts, notable mainly for the beauty of the wrapping paper.
As you work into the 30s and 40s the ratio of return steadily declines, and if, by the time you have reached 50, you are getting back ten cents on the dollar, you are a lucky fellow indeed.
But for the young person Christmas is like being chief engineer on the gravy train. The adolescent and the pre-adolescent are like little octopii, attaching their rapidly waving tentacles to a budget-breaking assortment of extravagantly priced articles in an ascending order of pain to the harassed parents—from the $20 Tinker Toy, through electric trains and bicycles, to the inevitable second-hand convertible which is usually turned over near the old Tehama underpass or run into a bridge before the middle of January. Christmas is for the young and for whatever the traffic will bear and it is wonderful.
For an example of a fool-proof gold-plated Christmas proposition which will illustrate my point I have to go back to the early 17th century and remember my own childhood. Up until the age of 12 my grandfather gave me, each Christmas Eve, a scrupulously new $5 bill. And what did he get from me? What he got from me, year in and year out, was two 5 cent packages of orange flavored Life Savers. This is so much better than the hog business, considering it as a return on your investment, that to think of it makes my head spin.
Is used to make my head spin then, too. In fact I blame my downfall for the delusions of grandeur which this yearly trade planted in my breast. I used to swagger around town convinced that I was the hottest little three foot high business genius since the Rothchilds hit the scene.
On my twelfth birthday I was sent down to grandfather’s office to work for a month as an office-boy. My duties as I remember them now were to steal stamps, rifle everyone’ s desk, lose mail on the way to the post office, and giggle like a half-wit whenever I was introduced to one of grandfather’s friends.
Now grandfather was a monument of a man; he had a reputation for integrity and honesty that was most impressive. “A man’s word is his bond,” he used to growl. “When I shake hands with a man over a deal we don’t need no damn lawyers.”
In discussing my wages with grandfather I had rejected his offer of 50 cents a day and counter-proposed that he pay me one penny the first day, two pennies the second day, four pennies the third day, and so on, doubling up each day for a month. It was an evil little plan I had worked out in detail, and when I received grandfather’s hand to seal the arrangement I realized that I had pulled off my greatest financial coup to date.
I can still remember sitting at the dinner table arguing with grandfather at the end of that month, still remember the slowly growing sense of outrage as I realized that grandfather’s reputation for honesty was grossly exaggerated and that he was treating the whole thing as a joke.
It was no joke to me. My wages for that month came to $10,613,383.72 and I want to state publicly that to this writing I have not received them. I can’t help feeling that life might have turned out much differently for me and that I wouldn’t have ended up knee-deep in a hog pen if grandfather hadn’t been a welcher.
Ah, well, that’s the way she goes; one day you’ve got her and the next thing you know you’re a farmer.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Christmas II”
Tonight instead of looking at T.V. I have been sitting in a reverently darkened room thinking back to the Christmases of my childhood, remembering the family ritual with a sort of amazed disbelief. I have been remembering how it was and at the same time trying to convince myself that it really happened that way.
Remembered separately each Christmas
was ordinary enough, a time of high excitement for the children and a time of
gathering together for the adults, but add them together and they begin to take
on a patina of madness.
As I remember it now, the same
things happened every year; we each gave and received the same presents, and as
the years passed we grew more and more adept at our parts as the parts became
more and more insane and meaningless.
Can it be possible, for instance,
that every year from the age of 10 until the age of 17, I gave my sister a
goldfish bowl with 3 goldfish in it? It’s not only possible, but that’s what
happened, and I just realized that my sister hated goldfish, for within 10 days
she had invariably flushed them down the toilet, explaining to me in a way that
simply infuriated me that she was changing the water in the bowl.
What I received from sister each
year was a silver plated stirrup to hang neckties on. I wonder where all those
stirrups went—at one time I had enough to outfit a regiment of Mexican cavalry.
Father gave me punching bags and
boxing lessons at the YMCA. It’s obvious now that he was combating my
grandmother’s effeminizing influence and that he was trying to make a real
he-man out of me, but at the time it seemed apparent to me that he had made a
poor buy on a gross or so of punching bags and was simply trying to get rid of
them as gracefully as possible. The attic at home is still bulging with
mildewed and deflated punching bags, some of them hanging from the rafters and
some of them not even unpacked from their original boxes.
Opposed to father were my aunts;
while he was trying to get me taught how to break someone’s nose with my fists,
my aunts were working on their specialties. Aunt Anna gave me books on
etiquette, how to be a perfect little gentleman. Manners were very important to
her and every year I received a book about “the goops,” nasty little kids who
ate with their fingers and didn’t wash behind their ears. Aunt Inga’s obsession
was with my mind. She concentrated on the classics. Before I could even read I
had an extensive library, and her psychology was really sound because the books
were all so beautifully illustrated that I could hardly wait to learn how to
read and find out why Robinson Crusoe
was looking so scared at that footprint or why
all those little people had tied down Gulliver.
Christmas was very important to the
family. For instance, my Aunt Tree, who had married a Norwegian and lived in
Traveling in those days was a hard,
slow process; it seems apparent to me now that all my Aunt Tree did was travel
back and forth between
Aside from the fact that we always
got the same presents, the following events invariably took place.
1. Uncle Jim, who had what we delicately referred to as a “drinking problem,” played Santa Claus. He was at the ribald song-singing stage by the time they got the red suit and whiskers on him, barely able to navigate. At some stage in the present handing out ritual he would lurch into the tree and become entangled in the lower branches. My aunts, for some reason, found this unspeakably vulgar.
2. The mayor of Seattle, who was a friend of
grandfather’s, always dropped by just before dinner for a drink; before he left
he would at some point in the visit lock himself in the toilet and be unable to
get out. No one else in the world ever had any trouble with that lock except
the mayor. The poor devil spent a good 30% of his time in grandfather’s house
pounding on the door of the downstairs bathroom, rattling the key and cussing
like a muleskinner.
3. Normally the family did not drink much, but on
Christmas Eve there were always countless half-filled toddy glasses sitting
around, and all the children, all of us from age 6 to 16, seemed under a
compulsion to sneak in and drain as many of these as we could. “Just look how
excited the children are,” the aunts would say to each other, happily, “look
how their eye shine; look how red their faces are.” Excited, hell, we were just
plain drunk—a whole house full of little 8-year-old alcoholics. That must have
been a pretty sight. None of the family ever caught on.
4. This week’s contribution is getting
disgustingly long but I want to mention one last memory of 10 Christmases in a
row. This one deals with my stepmother, who joined the family when I was about
6. She was sort of a child-bride type, very pretty, very naïve, and very
straight-laced. She hated drinking, but somehow always ended up on Christmas
Eve with 3 or 4 stiff drinks tucked under her belt. When intoxicated, my
stepmother had one unpleasant attribute: a high, piercing, shattering laugh,
which was like several tons of ice cubes suddenly being dumped into the room
through the ceiling. It was a shocking experience, and after 3 Christmases she
was referred to by my aunts, behind her back of course, as The Laughing Hyena.
Now, grandfather was a man of dignity and was treated with great reverence by
the family and I always knew when Christmas Eve was over; it was that moment
when I glanced up drunkenly from my toys to watch horror spreading over the
faces of my aunts. They in turn watched my stepmother, the little child bride
intruder, her silvery shrieks of laughter shaking the very pictures from the
walls, sitting on grandfather’s lap and squeezing the blackheads out of his
nose.
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Dentists”
Los Molinos Sun, pg. 3
By M.T. [Moritz Thomsen]
About six months ago one of my teeth began to communicate with me. His message, as it became clearer and clearer, was that he preferred to leave his old home to live a life of his own. I knew two months before I did it that I would have to go to the dentist.
Now if there was anything I have
hated in the past it was crawling like a dirty beat dog into a dentist’s chair;
just thinking about that hour of torture used to make the hair start on my head
and the flesh crawl. What I didn’t know, and what perhaps many people still
don’t know, is that in the last five years new and miraculous dental
anesthetics have been developed. Not only the pain but even that awful sense of
apprehension and horror that makes your heart pound and your palms damp has
been eliminated, and you lie back in something just short of bliss, smile at
your dentist with a goody smile and say, “Go ahead, doc, pull out a couple more
if you feel like it, if it will make you any happier.”
Dr. Merithew, our dentist in Los
Molinos, not only uses these fine new anesthetics, but he has developed a psychological
trick or two that really has me fascinated.
Apparently some degree of leverage
is required when removing teeth, and to have a solid base of operation the
patient’s head is pressed firmly against the dentist’s stomach. This may sound
clinical, but actually it is hard to imagine anything more intimate and
friendly.
Dr. Merithew’s first trick is this:
he puts his finger into the patient’s outside ear so that the only sounds one
hears come from what might delicately be described as the inside.
I was lucky enough, or was it all
planned that way, to find myself plugged in on Dr. Merithew at approximately
We made musical history that day, didn’t
we, doctor?
Mill Run
By Moritz Thomsen
Los Molinos Sun
No date
“Dharma Bums”
One of this week’s
letters to the editor offers some practical and hard-boiled suggestions on
bringing prunes to the attention of the Beatniks and thus increasing the demand
for one of
Mr. P. Garst, who has
just read Jack Kerouac’s latest novel on the Beatnik outlook, has, however,
missed the profounder implications of this book, The Dharma Bums. The ultimate aim of the Beatnik is finally exposed
to the world, and it could just possibly make of a good producing prune orchard
the most desirable property in the country.
Farmers are kulaks,
the Beatniks say, completely enslaved by their land. Or as Thoreau put
it—farmers pushing their 160 acres of land with their noses to the grave. The
working man is a slave to his belly; the capitalist, to his money. Everyone but
the Beatnik is enslaved by his possessions, his ego, his passions, or his
vices.
What is the answer to
this unhappy mess? Well, Mr. Kerouac tells us, the answer is simple. The only
decent activity for a man today is prayer and meditation—little Buddhist
prayers and little Buddhist meditations.
As Mr. Kerouac points
out, it is important to be on the road when you are praying and meditating;
everything you need should be packed on your back, and it is important, too, to
head for the higher altitudes. Apparently, prayers above the timberline carry
more snap, crackle, and pop than the sea-level ones, and naturally if you have
to hike 60 miles from a grocery store to pray you have to carry concentrated
foods like, according to Mr. Kerouac, wine, whiskey, rum, Rye Krisp, cheese,
dehydrated potatoes, and dried fruits.
Unfortunately at the
moment there are not more than five beat Buddhists bums living in the mountains
on prunes and boiled rice. This would seem on the surface to offer little hope
to the prune growers of an expanding market, at least in the direction of the
High Sierras.
But wait. Do you know
what these five beat holy men are praying for? They are praying for us—for you
and me, the enslaved ones, and the force of their prayers is, they say,
irresistible.
“I see the day coming
real soon,” the hero of The Dharma Bums
says, snapping out of one of his high-altitude mediations and grabbing for a
bottle of
Studying the falling
prices of farm commodities and the prediction that they will be 20 percent
lower next year, I am inclined to agree that this is quite a legitimate
possibility. But I don’t give Mr. Kerouac’s prayers the credit.
Prune-growers, can’t
you see the potential? The prune dispensing machines glittering in the sun from
the top of every mountain between Canada and Mexico and 50 million bums, good
American beat bums, freed from their chains, happily chomping on prunes year in
and year out. The concept is staggering.
LETTER TO M.T.
Dear M.T.
Mrs. Mohler and I are
quite entranced with the idea of making like a song-and-dance team before the
Prune Advisory Board—a real nifty thought. Not that we’d add glamour to the
prune industry, but it is fun to think about. By the way, we appeared before
the above-mentioned PAB, although there were some advertising agency men,
complete with grey flannel suits, in the audience. Our purpose was to beg the
assembled multitude to jazz up prune advertising and merchandizing, and get
people to TASTE the “new prune.”
As for pasteurizing,
as it is used by some prune packers, it does not mean germ-killed, but it does
mean that the prunes have added “eat-ability” and are softer, more tender, even
MORE delicious. Actually, the heat in prune dehydrators does a good job of
“pasteurizing.”
The mechanics of
presenting our little dealie was quite simple and a clever guy like you should
be able to figure it out. Miz L. spoke a piece, and Miz M. spoke a piece, and
NEITHER of us glared at the august gentlemen; it was more like a simper, or a
luring leer.
Anyway, all is
forgiven and we just love you for putting prunes into print. By the way, that
gift package was a week’s supply, and was not supposed to be voraciously
consumed between Seven Oaks Orchard and your ranch. We know they’re delicious,
but still—
Your constant reader,
Sydney Lindauer