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In the last week or so, we've posted a series of threads that dealt with various personalities. In setting them out, it occured to me how some of them actually reach back to the supposed purpose of this blog, which is:
Well, in reality, that broadened out pretty rapidly to taking into account looking at everything in this era in trying to get a grasp on it. Since then, it's certainly broadened out enormously, probably much too much.
Anyhow, some recent items help illuminate some of the things of this era, and the one immediately after it. Indeed, as we'll discuss, one of them helps actually define, maybe, how to property define certain eras.
The items we looked at which brings this to mind are the story of Maj. Gale "Buck" Cleven, that of Dick Proenekke, and also Lee Marvin, and the work of the Southern Agrarians, and that of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
Quite a varied set, I'll admit.
Let's start with Dr. Gale Cleven, which is how most people who knew him, knew him as, the latter part of his life.
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I'd never heard of Dr. Cleven until I started Watching Masters of the Air. The show references him as being from Casper Wyoming, and that caused me to research him further. As noted on the entry on him, he was born in Lemmon, South Dakota, but came with his family to the oil town of Lusk when he was just a very small boy. From there he moved to Casper, at some point.
What I could find on him notes that he worked as a roughneck as a young man, while going to college to study geology. I did both of those things also, and also simultaneously, giving me an odd occupational connection with him, although one that's not all that uncommon around here. I did find that a little startling, however.
What all that does, however, is to show the very long-lasting economic feature of Wyoming as being an oil and gas province, something that is still the case, but waning. It remains a strong aspect of the state's economy, however. This has been the case since, as we explored earlier, at least 1917, although things were headed that way earlier. It's interesting, looking back, to realize how many of us in The Cowboy State, have worked in oil and gas in some fashion. Given the economic reach of the industry, darned near everyone at one time.
Something else that really had the reach was the newspaper, in the form of The Society Page. I was able to track Gale Cleven, as he would then have been known, joining a fraternity and going to UW dances. I could even track who he was casually dating.
That's odd.
Society columns in newspapers were common at least into the 1950s, and even beyond that. They reported all sorts of snoopy stuff. I've found, for example, my grandfather mentioned in The Denver Post because his sister was visiting, this in the 1930s. Another sister of his visited somebody in Denver in the 1920s. Whose business was that?
They also reported on when people went on vacations, even extended vacations, which is a horrible thought.
I guess it shows, to an extent, the concept of privacy, which the Internet has eroded, is a modern thing. In the newspapers of the 20s divorces made front page news, births were mentioned, as they are now, scandals were reported, and where you were going, with whom, was as well.
People were keeping track of things and didn't need an iPhone to do it. No wonder people all subscribed to the paper.
This item also pointed out what a small world Wyoming was and is. Cleven, whom I had not heard of previously, took a relative by marriage to a dance. She was from a ranch family that owned a ranch that I later owned a piece of. She married a rancher who left his name on a prominent local feature. One of her brothers-in-law was the best friend of one of my old, now long gone, partners. That fellow was killed in World War Two. My partner was a crewman on a B-24.
In the small world item also is the thought that I, my father, my wife, and my children all walked the same high school halls, and have driven on the same streets as this fellow.
And that fame, to the extent fame is involved here, if fleeting. I'd never heard of him in spite of his remarkable wartime service. Nothing is named for him here.
Another thing, and one that cuts a bit against something I've noted here in the past.
As I've noted, for at least some Americans, going to university was really a post World War Two thing. That's widely known. Less well known is that Catholics didn't go to university for the most part until after the war (and I don't know what religion Cleven was).
Cleven's story shows that this was already changing before the war, however. Cleven didn't come from a wealthy family, and his parents clearly weren't college educated. But there he was, at UW, before the war.
University education was reaching down to the Middle Class, even though we were still in an era when less than 50% of American males graduated from high school
Indeed, while its jumping ahead, the story of Richard Proenneke demonstrated that. He dropped out of high school as it didn't interest him but went on to, at first, as successful blue collar career. He seems to have actually retired in his 50s.
Back to Cleven, he had what looks to be the start of a pretty conventional, Wyoming, advanced education before the war, and then went on to an extraordinary one due to the war in no small part. That demonstrates the manner in which World War Two altered all of society massively.
We'll get back to that.
Finally, in regard to Cleven, his story also demonstrates the ongoing impact of disease in that era. His young wife was killed by polio.
The polio vaccine didn't come out until 1955, two years after her death. Somewhat associated with children now, polio in fact struck adults as well. It was highly contagious and it often killed rapidly. People went form well in the morning to dead by the end of the day. And the deaths weren't pleasant. That appears to be basically what happened to her.
Polio, like Small Pox, and Measles are all preventable by vaccines. So is Covid. Not until recently, in the post Reagan post Scientific era, have Americans lost their faith in these lifesavers.
And that is, quite frankly, stupid.
Let's look at Proenekke.
I really think Proennekke's story has been misconstrued, now that I've looked at it. He tends to be viewed as somebody who turned his back on the modern world and moved to the Alaskan outback. In reality, however, he's a guy who lived his whole life as a single man and retired young, then moved, in retirement, to the outback.
It's a bit different.
Proennekke's life brings to mind two items of social change, both of which are increasing rare and difficult for "moderns", or "post moderns", if you prefer to understand. One is the existence of lifelong bachelors with nothing else being assumed about that status, and the other is the true jack of all trades.
We'll take the bachelorhood story, which we've dealt with before in another context, first.
Supposedly today 30.4% of men never marry, more or less (that's a 2010 figure) and 23% of women. In 1900 that figure was 38.8% and 29.7% respectively, but that doesn't mean the same thing at all. We've already seen that prior to the mid 20th Century, in many places "living together" was a crime, and in others that would have resulted in a common law marriage. So those figures really reflect people who lived lives alone
The percentages dropped for every decade of the 20th Century, until the 80s, when they started hovering right around 30% consistently, never going back up to the 1900 38.8% for men. For what it is worth, for women they dropped to an all-time low for the 1960s, of 17.3%, and the went up to about 23% where they've remained. Realistically, however, the current 30% and 23% are probably significantly lower, if we take into account situations where couples exist but without the formal benefit of marriage.
And that's significant in multiple ways.
Currently, nearly any male in the "never married" category without some sort of female "significant other" will flat out be assumed to be homosexual once they get much past 30 years of age. Many people will even assume that Catholic clerics must be homosexual, as they are required to be celibates. The pressure is so high on unmarried males to declare, in some fashion or another, at the present time, that its actually proven to be a problem for recruiting Catholic Priests as some who have expressed a latent desire to do so have already married due to pressure, or have gone down the secularly pressured road of girlfriend and actions that used to wait until marriage to the extent that they really cannot get back from it. For that matter, single men past a certain age are not only assumed to be homosexual, but are often societally pressured, in some areas, to be one in order to explain their status. The thought that somebody could function, more or less alone, but with normal inclinations, just doesn't exist anymore. The thought that anyone, and indeed anyone who isn't a cleric, could function in a single celibate way is almost regarded as making that person a raving deviant.
It was quite common, however, at one time. Indeed, there are at least four movies that touch on the topic, all of which might be a little hard for people to grasp now, but which showed that this was a normal frame of reference for viewing audiences at one time, with those files being Marty (1955), The Apartment (1960) Only The Lonely (1991) and Brooklyn (2015). The evolution of the films shows how this evolved, with the protagonist in Marty being a single male who is assumed by everyone, including his family, will remain one. Indeed, they wish him to. In The Apartment it is not assumed that the young executive will marry, even as he develops a deep affection for the female protagonist. In Only The Lonely the situation is much the same as Marty, but with the mandatory introduction, by that time, of sex into the film. In Brooklyn the assumption of marriage is much stronger, and indeed becomes a problem during the film.
Truth be known, however, up until at least the 1980s this was a relatively common thing to encounter, and there was no assumption that a single male was attracted to other men by any means. Usually the single status was regarded as sort of a tragedy, but not one that was a deviation from the norm to much of a degree. Indeed, I can easily recall several examples of this in adults when I was growing up.
One such individual was a plumber who was well liked and who lived next to my grandmother. He was a veteran of World War Two and had served almost the entire war in a Japanese POW camp. For that reason, he never turned the lights off in his small house, as they had not done that in the camp. HE never married.
Also, a tradesman, another person in my father's circle of friends was a fellow who was a plumber and who didn't marry until the 1980s, at which time that was regarded as nearly foolish as he would have been in his very late 50s or perhaps 60s at the time. His long bachelorhood was not regarded as strange in any fashion, and for much of that time he lived with his mother, inheriting her house after she passed away.
Another example was a friend of my father's who was a mail carrier. He'd started off before World War Two to become a Protestant minister in his home state of Nebraska, but like so many others, the war interrupted his planned career, and he was an artillery spotter during the war. When he came back, he did not resume his studies, although he remained devoutly religious. He dated after the war, at least until the late 1950s, but never found anyone and never married, passing way after my father and after having lived a very long life. He was one of two postmen who shared a lifelong bachelorhood status, the other one living in a tiny house in North Casper, who when he passed away was a millionaire.
About the only example of this that ever struck me as odd, when I was a boy, were a brother and sister who lived down the block from us. They were both school teachers and never married, and lived into their old ages in a house they jointly owned. I recall they called my father by a diminutive, the only people who ever did that, which he hated.
They had a Golden Labrador.
Finally, the owner of a men's clothing store here in town was single his whole life. He was a fanatic UW football fan.
Could any of these people have been closeted homosexuals? Sure, but it certainly wasn't assumed so. Indeed, it was just regarded as the fate they'd fallen into and a bit sad. Most of them had something that was a bit quirky about their characters, and the majority of them were tradesmen or blue collar workers, although not all were. That might tell us something there.
Prior to the Second World War, there were entire occupations that tended to be dominated by single men. Most of those occupations involved hard labor in some fashion. By the 1920s ranch hands, for example, were single men, and they often spent their entire careers in relatively low paying jobs that precluded them from ever marrying. The few places that actually have hired cowhands today, if you find a career one, replicate this. Enlisted men in the Army had always been single in US history unless they advanced to more senior Non Commissioned Officer status. Well after World War Two, enlisted men frequently required permission to marry from their commanding officers, and before World War Two they routinely did. Wartime was the exception, as married men were brought into the service during war. Even junior officers were not usually married.
This somewhat reflects, therefore, the harder working conditions and lower incomes in society overall. Being married took enough of a male's income to make it work, as women often were not employed and typically were not employed once they started having children. Hired hand status on farms and ranches, and enlisted status in the service, precluded marriage as a result. The long working hours in some instances, and griminess of manual labor, also worked against marriage for a certain percentage of men as hypergyny didn't favor it, if other options were available.
Indeed, this also helps explain the occupations that the actually closeted went into, as has been discussed before. Generally occupations that paid better, or steadily, and perhaps which weren't grimy in comparison to others, also favored marriage. Occupations that were essentially white collar in a way, that didn't favor marriage were very few and far between.
The other thing Proennekke's story brings up is the successful jack of all trades. His father was one, and he seems to have been as well. Men with really good mechanical skills who could go from one setting to another were pretty common, and indeed they were at least up until the 1990s. "He's good with his hands" was a compliment that was often paid to somebody who could act as a universal skilled laborer.
I'm sure that these guys still exist, but not nearly in the numbers they once did. I really can't recall meeting one recently, except for older ranchers who are that way by default. Indeed, everyone I knew of a certain age who had grown up on a farm or ranch was like this. I was actually surprised as an adult to meet younger ranchers who didn't have those skills, although plenty of them still do.
Finally, there's the modern aspect of strongly pigeonholing, indeed even limiting, people by their perceived disabilities, many of them mild.
The item on Lee Marvin notes that he was afflicted with ADHD, which may in part account for his somewhat wild nature, his early failings at school, and his strong affinity for alcohol. Or maybe not. At any rate, he was enormously successful at his trade, acting, and he would never have known he was ADHD, if he was.
This is true of all sorts of things like this. Dyslexia, which I have in a mild form, also afflicted such people as George S. Patton. Not knowing what it was, you didn't really worry about it, and carried on.
It's not that these things should be ignored, but I worry that our appreciation of them may not be really well-founded in biology, and certainly evolutionary biology. Dyslexia, some now claim, is not a neurological disorder or an impairment, but a concession for cognitive strengths in exploration, big-picture thinking, creativity, and problem-solving, so its a byproduct of generally positive aspects. ADHD, which occurs strongly in some human populations, is now suspected to be an evolutionary trait favored evolutionary people, which makes lots of sense, and which frankly is something that we earlier realized when we called people polymaths and autodidacts. In contrast, the large occurrence of anxiety in our modern populations reflects an evolutionary need to be careful and alert, made problematic as our modern cubicle lifestyle sucks.
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