Why, 0 Why, 0 Why 0, Do They Ever Leave Owosso?
Mallon, Thomas
Thomas Mallon Why, 0 Why, 0 Why 0, Do They Ever Leave Owosso? In a small Michigan town, the Curwood Festival welcomes summer each June. On a Tuesday night more than forty years ago the town of...
...It is, too, although it falls slowly...
...The contestants themselves are Parade Unit #54, right behind last year's winner, Jim Stechschulte, who sits clutching his trophy in glorious contentment atop a white convertible driven by two fabulous sunglassed babes...
...The Bear is eager to be both entertainment and art (a friend describes it as "Disney meets German expressionism"), and, in fact, just as Selznick's achievement far surpassed Margaret Mitchell's, Annaud's rises way above and beyond the nicely realized moral yarn that is Curwood's novel...
...typewriter, and one more turn above that brings you to a circular wall full of display cases containing an assortment of translations, movie posters, and family photographs, including one of Curwood's second wife, Ethel M. Greenwood, who was every bit as pretty as Myrna Loy...
...The Grizzly King was a kind of tract, the result of a conversion its author underwent when he was shown mercy by a bear ("Thor" in the novel) that he had just before wounded...
...It's American and it makes you feel at home...
...scream some girls bent on mortifying a passing, marching Scout...
...From an aerial One important function of small towns has always been to make some of their sons and daughters hate them, and there was surely at least one boy and one girl on that float dreaming, even now, of New York...
...In the end, however, the look-alike prize goes to #5, Jake, who bears no resemblance at all to his owner, a little girl named Megan...
...It is my desire and my ambition to take my readers with me into the heart of this nature...
...You've got to try somethin' besides one thing...
...There are still some musicians and vocalists going, including one who's softly singing "From a Distance," that surprisingly popular song about how God is watching us, and how to Him, Up There, it all looks the same...
...The chubby kid in the "Alf' T-shirt rises from the grass...
...This intruder oligarch, The "perfect" society, Pray, my bullet finds its mark...
...The Curwood Queen, young Rachel Rodriguez, and her court are introduced...
...And that is only one instance of many in which I now regard myself as having been almost a criminal—for killing for the excitement of killing can be little less than murder...
...Its essence can be found, if you're looking for it early on Friday evening, at the new outdoor amphitheater behind the junior high school...
...Near its tents hang some guns and skins...
...The PACE banner displays a sunburst-shaped panoply of co-dependencies and clienteles: DEPRESSION, EATING DISORDERS, EMOTIONS, ABUSE, WELLNESS, STRESS, COMPULSIVE BEHAVIORS, FAMILIES, PARENTING, STUDENT PROBLEMS, CHILDREN, TEENS, SENIORS, ADDICTIONS, BEHAVIORAL PROBLEMS, ADULTS...
...Size—biggest and smallest—is a more acceptable bone of contention, and the competing dogs parade around squares marked off with the yellow tape that in other towns usually indicates a homicide scene...
...Curwood had been sick with a streptococcal infection for just ten days...
...There are teeny twirlers and the Owosso 6th Grade Band...
...Gale Burke and his beer-bellied group, representing a local hospice, do a lip-synched version of "Sea Cruise" complete with chorus-line kicks...
...Local commerce and culture are responsible for much of what floats by on flatbeds: a huge inflated carton of Vitamin D milk from the Michigan Milk Producers...
...On a Tuesday night more than forty years ago the town of Owosso, Michigan, had a date with history, and history stood her up...
...Mayor Christine Mitchell, who looks like a Century 21 representative, declares that this year's festival will be a continuation of the celebration the town has been having for the return of two local guard units from the Persian Gulf...
...The sound of baseballs hitting the tin backboard behind stubbornly upright beer bottles is now produced at 67 cents a popthey prove altogether more crowd-pleasing than Jeff Smelser and his men, who let down the Handicapped Children's Foundation with a drag version of "Send in the Clowns" that somehow segues into an unknown rock number...
...From the amphitheater stage, a woman explaining the Ugliest Dog event detects a murmur of disapproval and asks, a little apologetically: "Is that controversial...
...He used it as a writing studio and a place for entertaining movie people and foreign visitors: all over its main room you can still find the holders needed for displaying their flags...
...Owosso hopefuls reprise their performances from last night, and their campaigners keep collecting, up to the last minute, the money that will, according to Cheryl Gapinski, "stay right here in Shiawassee County...
...1 year, 12 issues $29.95 (regularly $42) ^ 2 years, 24 issues $49.95 (regularly $84) ^ Special trial offer – 6 months $16.95 Mail along with check to Works, 1565 Cliff Rd., Suite 3-450, St...
...The curbside crowd gives its applause to a retarded citizen in a wheelchair and a group of people—walking, not riding—who have had organs replaced...
...71 34 The American Spectator June 1992...
...Nobody could hit 'em"), perhaps on their way down to Ken's Coin Corner on Main Street for some Desert Storm Trading Cards...
...y 6 6 ou must have been in the army," says a man in line to the probable–World War II veteran griddling row after row of perfect flapjacks at the Rotary's breakfast in the Owosso Junior High cafeteria...
...If he was that famous," says one visitor to another, "how come the whole time we grew up in Holly, we didn't hear about him...
...And if you want to gaze at Mt Curwood's little castle, sit down on a wooden railing near the Heritage Footbridge on the east side of the river: you'll find yourself near some recent graffiti poetry signed by "Arnold D. Hallock '91": A sovereign soul: despised Creation damned, psychotic, American dream: demised, Assassin embryonic, Through the sniper's scope I see...
...JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD'S ILLNESS FATAL is the curiously indirect news that Owossoans got...
...He recalls the famous 1915 encounter with Thor that left Curwood "a new man," and refers proudly to "Jean-Jacques," the French director who said his trip to Owosso for The Bear's premiere was the highlight of his American stay...
...She doesn't know who the lookalike in the painting actually is, but the canvases on the castle walls depict scenes from Curwood books made into movies...
...The rafts are comic and ingenious, as varied as the floats in yesterday's parade, bearing slogans such as "Trees 'R Us—This Raft Is Totally Recyclable...
...For $15 this morning you can fly over Owosso in an open-sided Bell helicopter, if you're willing to depend on your seatbelt to hold you in as you rise from the community airport over the newer part of town and then fly right above Tom Dewey's leafy old street...
...With enough mercy, or luck, you'll make it, and Owosso will, too, you hope, past another forty-five summers, to the resurrection of its time capsule, on a June day right in front of Curwood Castle, whose trees will still be green with life...
...it is, in fact, one of the festival's big deals...
...As another graffitist working close to Arnold D. Hallock wrote: "No matter where you go, there you are...
...The Kelly Temporary Services raft capsizes after being shot with a hose—and then the hosers offer to help in righting it...
...After a day or two in town you feel the subject is never very far from the parental mind, and whenever you think you've stumbled into Grover's Corners, you can just go and buy a soda at the PACE booth (Positive Alternatives through Counseling and Education) behind the Armory...
...For weeks, each contestant has been representing a worthy local cause and his "campaigners," now working the crowd in identifying shirts, have been collecting donations for the candidate's particular charity...
...The American Spectator June 1992 27 He was not pressed into service as a substitute...
...Even the American Legion's gone eco-happy: the children of its Junior Auxiliary carry tree-shaped sandwich signs saying (front) "Plant a Tree and . . ." (back) "Let It Grow With Me...
...Carrie Senk, the Cur-wood Princess, comes by on a red convertible with her two-girl court, and you look at her on this lovely June night knowing that three-quarters of a century from now, long after this evening has passed out of everyone's memory, it won't be entirely gone from hers...
...HI, JOSH...
...Dewey's father, an editor, fared more successfully, and "our Tom," as another marker several blocks away calls him, would do Thomas Mallon's novel Aurora 7 is now available in paperback from W W. Norton...
...Gus Neibuhr, The Wall Street Journal "Works is a novel idea, mirroring the activity of Christians and the churches as seen both by the world and by those who are 'in the camp.' " Carl F.H...
...The rest of 'em'll go home and talk up a storm," predicts one lady after Clint goes up to claim his ribbon...
...Thus does Edgar, a ringer for Spuds Mackenzie, make a late entry into the owner look-alike contest, even though he is registered only for the Ugly Dog event...
...a letter on the stationery of the Owosso Dewey for President Club...
...The theme of this year's parade honoring the ecology-minded Curwood is "Trees—Guardians of the Earth," and the girl is led off and revived under one of the very environmental wonders that has made Owosso, in the words of a festival pamphlet, "the Bright Spot That's a Shade Better...
...Like Christmas and the Fourth of July, James Oliver Curwood is good for business...
...Satisfaction is fully guaranteed 33 own frame houses...
...But killing for food is not the lust of slaughter...
...on a June afternoon in 1991 some girls are splashing in the backyard pool behind it...
...The band strikes up the Owosso High School fight song, and when the little crowd has finished clapping along, it disperses to put the finishing touches on the activities that will be in full swing by tomorrow...
...Petersburg, Mo...
...There are still "Support Our Troops" signs in some windows—and in one of them, you notice, a security-alarm decal...
...6 6 he looks a bit like Myrna Loy, doesn't she...
...Near Owosso's first house, an 1836 cabin in which this morning some ladies are hammering dulcimers to the tune of "Danny Boy," a Revolutionary War camp has been set up ("Holy...
...Bruce Larson, The Crystal Cathedral WORKS Journal of the Church in the World...
...Splendid in their blueand-gold uniforms, the Owosso High School marching band makes its peppy way over the swaying Heritage Footbridge that crosses the Shiawassee to the castle, where they play "The Star-Spangled Banner" as members of the local VFW post raise the flag...
...After Dewey went off to trap the sharks and slugs of the New York underworld, he was niore or less gone for good, but Curwood loved coming home from his northern encounters with wolves and bears to write his stories in Owosso: "I think it is the nicest place in the world...
...Meanwhile, they should enjoy this first day of the festival, because "it's a beautiful night in Owosso...
...Some of them must even know the words to that song: there were kids from the Owosso High School Choir on a float this afternoon lip-synching what sounded like their own recording of "Lullaby of Broadway...
...A bustle of philanthropy takes place among the spectators, as campaigners for the Mr...
...But most of what passes by has a clear, didactic message, in accordance with either the conservation thrust ("Trees Supply Our Oxygen") or the local devils: "Get a Kid Hooked on Fishing Instead of Drugs" says the Elks' float, and a grandma under the Hardee's sign applauds vigorously when an ecology/anti-drug-combination float ("Make the World a Better Place . . . Be Drug Free") progresses in front of her...
...Brownie troop 538 and Cub Scout Pack 78...
...Many of his thirty-three books were turned into hasty movies, some by his own production company...
...28 The American Spectator June 1992 T he Curwood Festival gets off to a small but determined start at noon on Friday...
...Next it's the turn of the 1990 Grand Marshal to bring on his successor, a public school teacher and small businessman and former state legislator, during whose remarks one of the girls in the band, which has been standing at attention in the sun, quietly faints...
...The parade provides an opportunity not only for parental photography ("Yeah, we're next one coming up," says a young wife to her videotaping husband), but for parental propaganda as well...
...Is that a 'temporary' raft...
...The dowry she had ready was the sort of plain prosperous real estate required by the role...
...By 8:40 the combined take is up to $12,000 and the counters are still going...
...The boys with their dates wear T-shirts from the festival's three-on-three basketball tournament and the Risky Business style of sunglasses fashionable several years ago...
...asks one owner whose pet is competing with another's in the Singing Dog event...
...Of course, the Curwood Festival does not live and grow from year to year on pure devotion to conservation and literature...
...30 The American Spectator June 1992 a contribution to environmentalism is really a domestic pacification program: the big paper hands they hold up while riding their tractor-pulled farm wagon say not just "Don't Litter" but also "Turn Off the TV...
...A man behind a piano draped with the blueand-gold school banner is banging out "Mona Lisa," "Glow Worm," and a baffling near-ragtime version of "Misty...
...wosso is, if ever the saying was true, a good place 0 to raise children...
...Are they going faster than you thought they were an hour ago...
...It is true that in the great open spaces one must kill to live...
...In the Smallest Dog contest, little kids carry puppies in their arms and a couple of local women, clearly not apartment-dwellers, marvel at the diminutiveness of some Chihuahuas...
...By contrast, James Oliver Curwood will be celebrated this weekend (June 7-9) with square dances, hamburger-eating contests, raft races, brass bands, and a parade expected to attract 100,000 people...
...articles that have the virtue of being individually concise and informative, yet wide-ranging in their subjects...
...No doubt, if they're not parked, a few romantic couples are strolling by the river and looking up from there at the lights of the midway, those man-made "suns and moons all over the place...
...I guess the cats must have their tongues today," says the announcer...
...What was no doubt proposed to them as Republican Congressman Dave Camp, who looks like a college student-body president, elects to run beside his car, as if doing roadwork, waving and tacking toward both sidewalks, shaking hands and performing with a manic quality that makes George Bush look like Calvin Coolidge...
...I love it and I feel that they must love it, if only I can get the two acquainted...
...says the woman greeting tourists...
...It's clearly cooler to be hanging outside the tent than in it, but most kids between driving and drinking ages are well away from the whole scene...
...How do you make your dog do it...
...Here you can overhear boys on their bicycles talking about sliders and fastballs ("I started smashin"em in there so hard he started cryin...
...The only shred of ambivalence that will be expressed today about America's military comes from two boys, when the VFW's Patriettes come marching by to much applause: "A little old, aren't they...
...Carpetbaggers Row is the name for the parking lot where they sell the same paraphernalia they'll be selling this summer at another dozen fairs in another dozen venues: shirts (heavy metal and Desert Storm), leather knife holders, Jesus buttons, pewter Garfields...
...But all these franchised operations in the open spaces near City Hall are really exceptions to the one-of-a-kind, authentically Owossoan nature of the Curwood Festival...
...Lined with porch-fronted homes and Protestant churches, the street still belongs to life, not history...
...It's a weekday, and most folks, auto-industry recession or not, are working, so the number of red-and-white-shirted festival organizers almost matches the number of spectators...
...a promotion for the Chesaning production of Showboat, July 15-20, starring Bobby Vinton...
...says a girl whose mother is trying to deny the tears she's wiping from behind her sunglasses while the 146th and 144th military police who were recently guarding Iraqi POWs ride by in their Humvees...
...There are also some Tennessee goats with startled expressions, a six-year-old Royal Palm turkey, a Jacob 4-Horn sheep named Ramses, and some unexotic ducks and bunnies...
...The race ends at the Heritage Footbridge as some of the last of the festival's contests, human iron-pumping and canine frisbee-catching, run their course...
...On this second day of fine hot weather, all of the festival's exhibits are up and running...
...The three Mr...
...The only item to interest some teenagers wandering through is the author's driver's license, set out with some other personal effects...
...are spectators ready for a round of the "Mr...
...Mayor Mitchell thanks the marching band for being there on Tuesday, just as they'd been there in the January cold to see the troops off...
...The helicopter that took you up here still has to get down to the same airport where in 1930 Cur-wood's son, James Oliver, Jr., was fatally injured in a plane crash...
...Much more engaging, and dear, are the Senior-Citizen King and Queen, who drive past in a closed, air-conditioned black Chrysler that's unfortunately a bit reminiscent of a hearse...
...Here on the western edge of the eastern time zone, plenty of golden light will last well past 9 p.m.—more than enough for the Kids in Curwood Country Parade, a sort of small-scale preview of tomorrow's...
...someone on the bank calls out...
...But Oliver Street looks pretty much the same up here as it does on the ground, a spot on which it's easy to keep your bearings...
...By eschewing the esoteric,eight, it's coming down East Oliver Street (where the "School Slow" sign still features a boy in short pants and a cap, not those bubble-headed spacechildren in the modern version), a few blocks down from the Deweys' old house...
...Across the other side of the Shiawassee from the castle, it's really just a big outdoor stage with a homage-giving turret motif to its roof...
...Now, as we roll on year after year, we must not forget James Oliver Cur-wood as we continue to have fun at each Curwood Festival...
...Just a short stroll south along the river will bring you to the Woodard Paymaster Building, from which folks long ago received their wages from the Owosso Casket Factory...
...It's Saturday morning, and this will be the festival's big day, so folks are stoking up...
...A cannon...
...Go for it, Geri...
...Owosso is about to have the remarkable experience of doing something that the rest of the country is watching on television: it is time for a parade...
...Both the T-shirts and Arnold D. Hallock are unlikely to do much harm, but the fact is that we've got trouble, right here in River City, and that starts with T and that rhymes with D and that stands for drugs...
...Going up a winding stair to one of the turrets, you find the author's big, black L. C. Smith & Bros...
...He ends by reciting the Curwood credo: "Nature is my religion...
...And then more than a score of unbelievably orderly dogs are permitted to promenade on leashes...
...I was born there and I hope to die there...
...Antique cars glide by every few minutes, and a wine-colored '41 Ford holds the 1991 Beautiful Baby Grand Prize winners, two little blond toddlers, a boy and girl, waving in a somewhat nauseating pre-professional way...
...The Shriners, crazy as bedbugs, zip around on little toy cars, shaking up the tassels on their fezes, and Benushka, this morning's victorious St...
...the Queen of the Montrose Blueberry Festival...
...A woman down at the local Chamber of Commerce will joke about Ivan Conger's inclination toward prolixity, andhe does hold the microphone in front of the castle longer than any of the other speakers this noon...
...There's a Pioneer area, too...
...and a group of women arrange to be at the Hardee's on Main Street by 6:30 tonight...
...Mom, you are so...
...Recalling Curwood's efforts to clean up the polluted Shiawassee, Conger quotes his renunciation of the "overlords of business," to whom no natural beauty is sacred, and one thinks that the silent assent by this gathering of Rotarians and boosters is something the Republican National Committee might be interested to note...
...Perhaps, after all these years, Owosso will put itself on the map not by sending a President to Washington but by taking one out...
...Actually, the Curwood Dog Contest has drifted perilously close to political correctness...
...The apartment, though marked, is now boarded up, and a bird sits cheeping on the ledge above the deserted commercial floor last occupied by a furniture store that couldn't quite make it...
...A time, in fact, when girls would dress for the prom by humming "I Feel Pretty" and "Tonight...
...one must have meat, and meat is life...
...The sound of hammers, and an occasional train whistle, float across the sunshine on a breeze...
...Bernard, glides along on a Chevy pick-up...
...In fact, so mindful is Owosso of what this weekend brings in that The American Spectator June 1992 29 the organizers inflict a good-natured insult on those vendors who are taking money out...
...Down near the midway you can find teenaged girls wearing "I LOVE MY BAD ASS ATTITUDE" T-shirts as well as a contented family whose mom's upper-body message to the world is "COWBOYS ARE BAD LOVERS BECAUSE THEY THINK 8 SECONDS IS A GOOD RIDE...
...The big Dewey house is privately occupied...
...Now that the soldiers are back home, she tells everyone to have a "fantastic" time, hitting each short vowel with a friendly Midwestern buzzsaw...
...A man in a gimme cap sings as he imagines his dog might, but it doesn't produce anything from the poor animal, and a big brown Labrador, into whose ear a small blond boy is making a high-pitched howl, succeeds only in looking tormented...
...He generates a polite, and complete, lack of crowd interest...
...Eugene Peterson, Christ Our King Presbyterian Church "...gives me hope that at last we will have a Christian magazine that is truly globate evangelical orthodox, catholic and charismatic...
...Though they're not over by much...
...But it is a small display, and it isn't even permanent...
...This country may not have known what to do with the Kurds, but you're reminded once more of how it can feed them and anybody else in a jiffy...
...The Biggest Dog prize is taken by Benushka, #8, a St...
...The barkers in their pink shirts have the kind of anger that proceeds from boredom, and they throw themselves into their work with a surly aggression, with out-of-town faces that can almost make you see them representing leering, luring evil—the seducers in some long-ago Sherwood Anderson story...
...This night, the poorly attended "Teen Dance," held in the "Wigwam," is a sad spectacle with a handful of very young people attempting Madonna moves to recorded rap...
...Fifteen percent of its Coke-selling operation goes to the festival, and the other eighty-five toward combatting "substance abuse" in the county...
...Charities and good causes abound...
...Republican Congressman Dave Camp, who looks like a college student-body president, elects to run beside his car, as if doing roadwork, waving and tacking toward both sidewalks, shaking hands and performing with a manic quality 32 The American Spectator June 1992 that makes George Bush look like Calvin Coolidge...
...During its 1986 sesquicentennial, Owosso buried, right near the castle, a time capsule it intends to open in the year 2036...
...The Best Plant Is a Transplant," says their sign, which makes good use of the botanically minded parade theme, reminding everyone of the collection containers in fast-food restaurants around town for Dan Rose's needed bone-marrow operation...
...As the boyhood home of Thomas E. Dewey, Owosso was supposed to take her place between Independence, Missouri, and Abilene, Kansas, in the line of smalltown mothers of Presidents, a spot she ended up being accorded for just a brief, false moment on the pages of the Chicago Tribune...
...Edgar (Spuds), after washing out as an owner lookalike, has walked off with the honors as Ugliest Dog—his original category...
...two VFW members make plans for taking care of the flag over the weekend...
...The riverbanks remain pleasantly crowded with activity until a little before 2:00, when you can feel the whole town being drawn, entranced, away from the river, away from the midway, away from the castle, on bicycle and foot, carrying lawn chairs and sun-umbrellas, as if by Professor Harold Hill, toward Main Street...
...Where, by the way, did they ever find a Festival Queen named Rodriguez...
...By that time the crowds are back on the midway and in the beer tent...
...Owosso" contest, which is a matter not of beefcake, but of cheerful charity...
...In the fall of 1989 the movie had its American premiere in Owosso, making Curwood's hometown feel a little as Atlanta did when David 0. Selznick unveiled Gone With the Wind at the Loew's Grand on Peachtree Street...
...The big announcement of the winner will come tomorrow night on the midway, in the Happy Hunting Grounds (i.e., the beer tent), and Cheryl Gapinski returns to the mike after "U Can't Touch This" to remind everyone to be there...
...Henry, founder, Christianity Today "Religious journalism that is straightforward and noncombative – No axes being ground here, and no gossip...
...Recently, however, The Grizzly King (1916) was filmed, with some seriousness and distinction, as The Bear, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, the director of Quest for Fire...
...The basement of the castle provides space for the Shiawassee County Genealogical Society and the Owosso Historical Commission, and in a little room tenanted by the latter, one can find Ivan A. Conger, the local historian who has worked mightily to keep Curwood's name and books circulating...
...One is inclined to respond with J. P. Morgan's line: If you have to ask, you can't afford it...
...They may have forgotten James Oliver Curwood in Holly, Michigan, but when he prematurely departed this world from Owosso, an extra edition of the Argus-Press for August 14, 1927, ran a headline so wide that the editors had to resort to periphrasis to get it across eight columns...
...Bernard complete with neck-keg...
...Even if one can follow some of the novel's diction (like "cayuse" and "hobble") only by remembering certain lyricsof Cole Porter (another small-town boy), one can't help being affected by The Grizzly King, just as one can't help being charmed by Curwood Castle, the folly the author built right in town beside a stretch of the Shiawassee flowing between the two Dewey homes...
...There's one of those, named Arnold, just outside in one of the pens set up on the school's front lawn...
...and a banner for Yaya's Flame-Broiled Chicken...
...it is not the lust which always recalls to me that day in the British Columbia mountains when, in less than two hours, I killed four grizzlies on a mountain slide—a destruction of possibly a hundred and twenty years of life in a hundred and twenty minutes...
...Back at the amphitheater a band or two keep going (marimba-ing "New York, New York" after a soft Eagles song), while the crafts booths make a few extra dollars before the castle closes up at 7:00...
...once and for all, but on Sunday morning the raft traffic on the Shiawassee is headed for the center of town and meant to express the perspective like this, a place like New York appears as a marvel of rationality, its clean lines cancelling the anger and randomness of all that's scurrying in the elevators and streets below...
...After being paraded in their boxer shorts, the finalists retreat to the dressing room of the nearby firehouse, and the contributions are counted...
...It is, however, the students of nearby Baker College who propose the most sweeping synthesis of various new world orders: SUPPORT OUR GUARDIANS TREES-=EXISTENCE MILITARY=FREEDOM EDUCATION=GROWTH The American Spectator June 1992 It is a simple-minded algebra, of course, and these universal theorems are offered from a kind of racial and religious Stepford...
...Owosso title continue collecting for their men...
...But until the truth at last gives itself up, mercy and luck will, for all practical purposes, amount to the same thing...
...The Association for Retarded Citizens of Shiawassee County is much better served by Tom Thon and his guys, who do an M. C. Hammer number ("U Can't Touch This") with as many acrobatics as a small group of overweight white boys can manage...
...As the boyhood home of Thomas E. Dewey, Owosso was supposed to take her place between Independence, Missouri, and Abilene, Kansas, in the line of smalltown mothers of Presidents, a spot she ended up being accorded for just a brief, false moment on the pages of the Chicago Tribune...
...says one kid to the other, who replies: "A little...
...Paul, MN 55122-9956 Name Organization Address City, State, Zip Or order (toll-free) 1-800-77-WORKS...
...There's a little exhibit devoted to Dewey down here, too: old Life magazines with the candidate on the cover...
...The National Victory Celebration in Washington, being carried live on CNN, is a bigger affair than what the Curwood organizers have put together, but there's something to be said for knowing the men marching past you as you sit on the curb in front of the Key State Bank...
...There are no two-headed calves or freakish fauna of any kind, and when the fesThe American Spectator June 1992 31 tival advertises a Little People's Place, it's talking not about midgets but the spot where pre-schoolers can finger-paint...
...n a couple of hours it's all over (with that almost eerie lack of litter), and the citizens are retracted, like changelings, back toward the festival grounds and their At Last, A Magazine That Really Covers The Church...
...A few blocks down, the Methodists are planning tonight's Swiss Steak Supper, and thanks to the Baptist Harry S. Truman, nobody coming to it will have to fight for a parking spot with any tourist: whatever cars are riding westward into town, past the corn and soybean fields between Flint and Owosso, will be heading toward something other than the presidential library that never got built...
...The River Daze races are the environmentalist climax of the festival...
...Huck Finn took a raft down the Mississippi to get out of St...
...Members of the Little Rascals 4-H Club appear to have been tricked...
...But this is 1991, of course, and the world of the Bundys—Al and Ted—keeps leaking into the Shiawassee valley...
...He came to realize that the greatest thrill of the hunt is not in killing, but in letting live...
...On the lawn in front of it at 6:30 p.m...
...Ultimately these two, Chip (the dog) and Clint Simmons, will be the winners, since no dog in the ring was willing to sing on the first attempt, and Chip was wise enough to howl on the second, no doubt to get his master away from his ear...
...The crown, a little model of Curwood Castle made by a high school student, will be placed on the winner's head by Rachel Rodriguez...
...One of them, the 146th, got back to the States only last Friday, arriving in Owosso, via Philadelphia and a fort in Wisconsin, for a Tuesdaynight parade...
...A bit of philosophy emerges, too: stick to your own game...
...Swimmers and waders flank their progress, participating in splash battles fought with paddles and buckets and water balloons ("Incoming...
...The vault and its marker were a donation, unsuperstitiously accepted, from the Jennings-Lyon funeral home, an establishment with, after all, a reliable record of burying things...
...While Dewey was still a student at Owosso High, Cur-wood's adventure novels—many of them set in the Canadian wilderness with titles like The Gold Hunters (1909) and God's Country and the Woman (1915)—were making him rich and famous, putting him in possession of a readership and sales figures comparable to Zane Grey's...
...We must keep his memory alive and ever before us in every way that we can...
...Look over toward City Hall and see the Ferris wheel prettily dripping its riders and cars through the twilight...
...One important function of small towns has always been to make some of their sons and daughters hate them, and there was surely at least one boy and one girl on that float dreaming, even now, of New York...
...Tom Dewey had been born in 1902 above his grandfather's general store on Main Street, on the west bank of the Shiawassee River...
...Still, if this town seems a shaky base for big beacons, the parade leaves you feeling you're in a place that does a good job producing its little points of light...
...No, the only library in town is the Owosso Public, a sturdy brick affair built with Carnegie money and opened in 1914, and the framed old Bachrach portrait that hangs inside on the second floor is not of Thomas E. Dewey at all, but of the town's ruling favorite son and local hero: James Oliver Curwood (18781927...
...The floats and banners bear mildly improving injunctions that the kids are made to endorse as the price of their brief celebrity...
...does not yet know that the crown will be his, and when the three contestants emerge from the firehouse, in tuxedos, they look like nervous prom dates from another time...
...People are not typically slender in these parts, and the skinny ones seem somehow seedy...
...Whether or not you wanted sausage, you're sure to be interested in the African Guinea Forest Hog...
...Those homes below your helicopter with subscriptions to Time magazine have on their coffee tables this week an issue whose cover inquires: "Evil: Does it really exist—or do bad things just happen...
...He's bested a handsome Dalmatian wearing an American-flag scarf who seemed shamelessly to be trying to capitalize on both the movie Backdraft and the victory in the Gulf...
...Standing there with his crewcut and string tie, the local historian marvels over how in 1977 the festival organizers were planning just a modest one-time centenary for Curwood...
...The midway, going strong by early evening, has its nondescript aspect, too, with name-brand Skee-ball booths and "NASA" rides with ominous disclaimers for the pregnant and back-injured—warnings put up not to attract thrill-seeking business, as such signs tried to years ago, but only to stave off lawsuits...
...one red-shirted woman tells another, "I got a float to get up and ready...
...Gale Burke hope that the rafters can forever stay in an Owosso just as green and peaceful as it is now...
...The lighthearted premise tonight is that you'll put money into the cans and mayonnaise jars in proportion to the talents displayed on stage by each of the three finalists and his backup men...
...There's a Phunny Phamily Photo booth close by it now, but the Rusty Strings—a mandolin, guitar, and bass have been a bigger draw for older people this morning...
...So heartfelt and clear-minded was his recantation that the indiscriminate hunter wound up becoming Chairman of the Game, Fish and Wildlife Committee of the Michigan Department of Conservation...
...Most take three pancakes to start with (cholesterol-conscious seniors can pass up sausages in favor of a fruit cup), and a small corps of efficient young club members is quick to come around with seconds...
...Poised, pretty Rachel thanks God for blessing Owosso with such a beautiful day and urges that the crowd "please don't hesitate to ask my court members or myself' any questions about the festival activities...
...By quarter to (three throws for $2), but it still timelessly rides the air with smells of frying food and caramel corn...
...He generates a polite, and complete, lack of crowd interest...
...Actually, no amount of advice seems to help this morning...
...Rachel is going to make a great Century 21 rep...
...most of his growing up in a big frame house on prosperous West Oliver Street, which, like most of Owosso, could serve as the location for a remake of any Andy Hardy movie...
...and an old campaign button touting the contender and his running mate, that Californian chosen to balance the ticket, Earl Warren...
...The only remarkable thing about all this generic stuff, if you're used to seeing it on urban avenues, is the lack of litter that gathers around it by the end of the day: throwing a candied-apple's wrapper into a wastebasket seems to come as naturally to an Owossoan as spitting on the sidewalk does to midtown Manhattanites...
...No more so than in any other place, of course, but the admonitions in tomorrow's grown-up parade will be noticeably stronger than the ones in tonight's...
...It's jammed with over-21s...
...You walk along Oliver and Washington Streets and see girls sunning themselves on a rooftop, people eating ham and jelly roll at a picnic table in the driveway...
Vol. 25 • June 1992 • No. 6
