Sunday, March 31, 2019

Watched THE HIGHWAYMEN last night--Not the 4 great singers but Kevin Costner & Woody Harrelson & a Great Crew


Hershel Parker Thank you, Stephen Kiernan, for the heads up on Facebook about the Netflix showing.

I had never heard of the movie but after THE BAKER'S SECRET I trusted Kiernan's judgment and made a note to watch it. I just finished it. As I said, I had not known who was in THE HIGHWAYMEN. Kevin Costner was. His father was my 2nd cousin, so I look at Kevin's ears and nose and listen to his voice carefully. I think he must be one of the bravest movie stars working now, to let himself look like a believable Frank Hamer. 

I was prepared to be moved by a movie that takes place in the Depression just where this one is. I have been steeped in Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma in the last months. For I few years I have been publishing about the American Revolution, mainly events that involved kinfolks I never knew about until recently. That is, I am learning Southern history by finding relatives who were involved in momentous events, and even are in historical records, sometimes. Following Hill cousins, one a Texas Ranger, I recently wrote an article on the 1862 Great Hangings of Gainesville, Texas, that will be in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly (I found an unknown very early history of the hangings. Cousin Aaron does not come out well.)  Lately the Texas Revolution has been on my mind, particularly Nacogdoches, where my Revolutionary veteran William Sparks died in 1848.  I sent off a thing today, an unknown piece written in Nacogdoches by a participant in the so-called Runaway Scrape. The first portrait in Frank Dobie's OUT OF THE OLD ROCK, Cousin George McGehee, was in the Scrape at the age of two months. George told his mother's story, a thrilling tale involving another McGehee cousin. I am about done with a longer piece on the 1836 flight to the Gulf ports and the Sabine. 

The Panhandle of Oklahoma has been on my mind. I explained to a cousin the other day that the "IT" she found in a document did not include Guymon--that was OT. In 1952 when I was an apprentice telegrapher in Red Rock, OK, we had OT and IT tickets on great hooks in the AT&SF depot, printed before statehood. Two Mississippi brothers went out to Oklahoma Territory around 1900 and homesteaded near Guymon, my grandfather Gene Costner and his brother Mode (Moses Amariah) Costner. Mode stayed there and died there. There were years when the only kinfolks the older children knew were the two Costner families. My parents are there in the 1930 census--something I learned recently. They had been in the Panhandle of Texas during some of the worst of the Dust Bowl. Guymon must have been a brief stay. After I was born they got to Escobas, on the Rio Grande, for four or five years. You can't rely on anything. I am in the 1940 Federal Census as born in 1930. We did a lot of Model A driving across Texas in the Depression.

Also, I have been thinking about Texas and Louisiana for weeks because the flight to the Sabine in 1836 put the Texian refugees near places I worked at on the Kansas City Southern starting in 1952--Noble, Zwolle, Many, DeRidder, Dequincy. I was in a TB warehouse east of Shreveport, out toward Texas, one summer. They had not heard of streptomycin. I found a place that had. For two years I was night telegrapher (8 pm to 4 am) on the Kansas City Southern at Port Arthur while I went to school in Beaumont. I am so old that when I graduated with highest honors in 1959 Dan Rather read my name aloud--on the radio, in Houston. I thought for the last several years that my Melville Collection (books and research files) would go there, to Beaumont. That fell through early this year and after much distress my first choice, the Berkshire Athenaeum, under a new young director, came through this month with a welcome to the books and research files--an enthusiastic welcome, publicized at once.  I will not have to put 60 bankers' boxes at the curb, after all.

So, I was all set to be powerfully moved by a Depression movie that took place in Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma and that starred Kevin Costner. 

The movie never had a false move until the slapstick ending, the exchange of drivers. Mr. Gault would have had to pee when they changed drivers. Did they shoot two endings? 

Thank you, Stephen, and congratulations to your friend, the writer John Fusco. It was a splendid movie.

---P. S. I had to check. If you are Southern you are either kin or connected, Double Cousin Lois says. Clyde Barrow is my 8th cousin 11 times removed, through the Knoxes. Mississippi cousins, deal with it. Well, Kevin is my 2nd cousin once removed. In the South . . . .

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Monday, March 25, 2019

10 feet long? The size does not show in the picture. Twice as big as usual.

Is it an elephant seal?

Gobble, early. Hens off on their own again.


The Berkshire Athenaeum is Publicizing the Acquisition of Hershel Parker's Melville Collection

The BA is using the announcement to encourage gifts to help pay for housing the Collection--very smart of them. There are a slip or too here. In fact, I hitchhiked into Pittsfield from NYC in the summer of 1962. That's a little more than four decades ago. I had the old Athenaeum almost to myself until the little school children came in late during the afternoon and brought the library to life. We are ecstatic to have the Collection at the new BA. Besides the books, there are thick chronological files packed with research suggestions--which I will not pursue but others may.



IS THIS A SCAM? CAN WINDOWS REALLY WANT TO DO ALL THIS?






Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Maureen Dowd is back. She gave us W by destroying Gore. Now will she focus on Beto?

My denial worked fine for two years after November 8, 8 pm Pacific Time. It is slipping a little.
I fear people who give us W and 9/11 (oh, how good it was to be in Crawford and not paying attention). I fear people like Bernie whose vanity gives us Trump. When I see Maureen Dowd's name on an article about Beto, I wish her two years of silence. Vanity again. She gave us W and can set out destroying Beto.
Full disclosure. I contributed hugely to the $6,100,100 in the first 24 hours. The 100 part. And I have never heard Kellyanne Conway's voice. (Is that how you spell her name?) I have will power. I will never read more than a headline by Maureen Dowd. You can't totally avoid headlines. Has she really retooled herself to give us a second term for Trump?

Quiet ride back--horse safe after racing through deep mud.


Springtime


Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Noisy Neighbors--Down to 4 Now


Very strong South Wind blew everyone else away


Good News. My Melville archives will go to the Berkshire Athenaeum

I hitchhiked to Pittsfield from New York in the summer of 1962 to study Melville. Often I worked in an empty library, the great old Athenaeum, until throngs of children arrived after school and brought it all to life. I thought it was wonderful--little bustling students all around and Gansevoort Melville right in front of me. I went back decade after decade, including the Clarel centennial in 1976 when I almost gave one man in the audience apoplexy from fury (although Helen Vendler, I was told, whispered that I was right). After discovering that the Harpers had not published Melville's The Isle of the Cross in 1853, I hurried up to look at all the fragmentary local newspapers in the hope I would find it serialized in the Berkshires! When my earning power was highest, in the 90s, I contributed to strengthen the local collection. I knew and revered all the librarians from Mrs. Zack through Ruth Degenhardt up to Kathleen Reilly. I offered all my Collection to the Athenaeum a decade ago, but the then-director felt there was no way of making room for it. We were dashed, for that was the right home for it.

I thought I had arranged for the collection to live near the Gulf of Mexico, where I had been the night telegrapher (8 pm till 4 am) on the Kansas City Southern at Port Arthur 1957-1959 while attending school in Beaumont. That fell through recently.

The director of a very likely library did not even acknowledge my offer for a month while I hovered over the email sites like Agatha Hatch watching her little mail box decay, day by day, year by year. Northwestern promptly and kindly offered to take the letters (some of them, notably Jay Leyda's, highly desirable) but could not take any books or chronological folders of documents from birth till death and a little beyond. The books, I have to admit, are not all mint examples. Some of them, extremely hard to obtain decades ago, are a little grubby. But oh, how happy I was to assemble a mismatched run of Modern British Essayists, the importance of which no one had recognized! A few of them were very expensive--a copy of Spenser like the one which Melville marked, the one which had been his father's, or one of Cousin Kate's memorial volumes for her brother Henry. Most of them were just working copies of books as they came out, or while they were still sitting around in bookstores. The thing is, there are hundreds of them, many not in Google Books, and many you can't "Look Inside" on Amazon. And offprints! There are hundreds of offprints mostly signed by names people remember. And there are letters from Willard Thorp, Leon Howard--everyone in the next generations up through Sealts and Hayford!

The news from the present Director of the Berkshire Athenaeum, Alex Reczkowski, and Kathleen Reilly is that the Trustees voted yesterday to accept the collection. Kathy attended the meeting after knee surgery and explained my importance "to the research and preservation of the story of Melville's life," then hurried home for ice packs. Reczkowski very kindly calls this "a huge win for the Berkshire Athenaeum." Here in Morro Bay there are two very pleased people. This is what we both wanted, before we thought we would never have it.