O C Fisher Reservoir at One Percent Capacity
Angling into Heaven
Drink. Dance. Pool.
Hobo Depot
Note: all photographs copyrighted by Louis R Nugent
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Rhododendrons and hillbilly music rarely mix in the same conversation...
Nevertheless, flowers and banjos converged in Asheville, North Carolina, as local businessmen pondered ways to attract more tourist dollars in 1927...
The first non-Native American tourists to the area dropped by around 1540 when the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto came seeking gold and trade routes to China. The first person of European descent who desired to be a permanent resident was one Colonel Samuel Davidson. In 1784, he built a cabin near what he called Christian Creek. He fatally incurred the displeasure of his Cherokee neighbors who neither used the same name for the stream nor recognized the authority of the United States to give their hunting grounds to other people. Davidson's demise resulted in troops being sent to make things safer for settlers and slaves. More people followed the late Colonel's footsteps. Later, travelers journeyed into the hills to savor the region's scenic beauty. Others came for other reasons. One, a British chap named Cecil Sharp, wandered into western North Carolina during World War One to collect old mountain songs that he hoped to link to older melodies in England and Scotland...
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| Near Asheville: A Grand Rough Ridge |
A decade after Sharp's visit, one of Asheville's adopted sons fretted that Appalachia's unique musical heritage was disappearing in the new age of radio. His concerns dovetailed with the financial desires of the local Chamber of Commerce. The good burghers of the village held a "Rhododendron Festival" in 1927 to bring in tourists with dollars to spend. Thinking to attract even more visitors with music and dance, they asked Bascom Lamar Lunsford for help. Well known and a first-name friend to practically every fiddler in Buncombe and Madison counties, lawyer Lunsford had released his first commercial recordings in 1924 for the General Phonograph Company, including "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground," an enigmatic tale whose narrator is haunted by memories of prison, his love and desire for a woman who wants things he can't afford to give her... a man who longs to be unseen, almost invisible, with power to root mountains down into dust...
Thanks to Lunsford, the Rhododendron Festival became the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in 1928 and continues yearly to this day. People who track this sort of thing say it was likely the nation's first gathering of traditional musicians to call itself a folk festival. The man who gave the celebration its distinct character performed annually until he suffered a stroke in 1965, eight years before his death at the age of 91...
Lunsford's almost obsessive love of music may have come from his family. Born due north of Asheville in 1882 in the town of Mars Hill, young Bascom had parents who valued education and the arts while remaining close to their rural roots. He would study at Rutherford College and became a teacher like his father. He left the education field for the higher income of a fruit tree salesman...
Traveling deep into the woods, Lunsford built a rapport with customers by sharing songs he'd heard along his route. He married and studied law, passing the bar in 1913. His legal background probably fueled a lifelong passion for politics. Lunsford managed campaigns for Congressman Zebulon Weaver, a Democrat, and later served as the reading clerk for the North Carolina House of Representatives. His twin passions, music and politics, merged in 1939 when President Roosevelt asked him to perform at the White House for the visiting King of England...
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| Bascom Lamar Lunsford |
Speaking of England, as the oddities of life would have it, Cecil Sharp, who shared Lunsford's fascination with old tunes, had his own minor connection to the judiciary. Having lived several years in Australia, Sharp read law there and became an associate to Chief Justice Samuel Ways before returning home to devote himself entirely to the world of music...
Like Sharp, Lunsford took collecting folklore and performing seriously. He dressed formally in tie and tails, providing erudite lectures to his audiences before attacking banjo strings with furious rhythmic upstrokes. "The Minstrel of the Appalachians" did a little songwriting of his own. Lunsford's best known tune, "That Good Old Mountain Dew", was likely inspired by working as a defense lawyer for moonshiners...
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| Lunsford performing with Frieda English |
Years after its recording, the grandly eccentric Harry Smith selected Lunsford's "Mole in the Ground" for inclusion in his epic "Anthology of American Folk Music." One of the collection's avid fans was a young Minnesotan who, transformed from Robert Zimmerman into Bob Dylan, tipped his hat to Lunsford in his classic "Stuck Inside Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" when he warned us "all the railroad men just drink up your blood like wine"...
if I was a lizard in the spring, I'd hear my darling sing...
Note: Photographs taken from Google Images. "A Grand Rough Ridge" appears on the Asheville Chamber of Commerce site and is credited to the North Carolina Arboretum. Portrait of Bascom Lamar Lunsford is from the Southern Appalachian Archives at Mars Hill college. Photograph of Lunsford performing with Frieda English is from the University of North Carolina Library which credits Hugh Morton as photographer.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
French Postcards, Volume One
Confession, the guiltless say, is good for the soul...
Therefore, I should confess to a certain envy of postcard photographers, especially those who snap shots of the westernmost tip of Oklahoma's Panhandle and convince the viewer that he or she has been given a glimpse of a verdant rainforest temporarily lacking rain and forests...
No such darkroom chicanery is needed by those who photograph the City of Lights...
Thirty bridges span the Seine River as it snakes through Paris. Archaeologists say humans settled the area as early as 4200 BCE. Much later, Roman armies swept into the river basin and established a continuously inhabited town first known as Lutetia about a half century before the birth of Jesus. Four hundred years afterward, it became Paris, renamed for a tribe of Gallic fishermen who'd inhabited the island in the Seine that became the heart of the future city. This belated honoring of native peoples came in the time of Julian the Apostate, a fourth century emperor who strove mightily to erase Constantine's vision of a Cross against the Sun from the minds of men and restore paganism as the state religion of Rome...
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| Visionaries of the Future Celebration, August 1893 |
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| 1900 in Paris |
The Eiffel Tower leaps to mind of many people automatically when the capital city of France comes up in conversation but should not be confused with a 70' replica topped off by a red cowboy hat in a northeast Texas city. Just barely completed, the French version of the Tower welcomed visitors strolling into the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Once inside, the curious might study the 400 people displayed as part of the Village Negre purporting to depict "primitives" in their "natural" state. Such human zoos were, sadly, not uncommon during the late 19th and early 20th century in either Europe or the United States. They often reinforced theories of Caucasian superiority. Perhaps the nastiest and most blatantly racist of these exhibitions took place in New York in 1906 when Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society, displayed a caged Congolese Pygmy alongside chimpanzees and orangutans with a sign identifying him as the "Missing Link"...
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| Basilica of the Sacred Heart |
Sacre Couer rises majestically over Montmartre, a district in the city attracting artists, tourists, and persons who operate over-priced open air cafes. Like the Eiffel Tower, the basilica (consecrated in 1919) is a landmark adored by some in the city and reviled by others. The former see it as almost magically enhancing the city's beauty. The latter offer it up as proof that tasteless barbarians have an almost unlimited capacity to create a monstrous eyesore. Montmartre's cemetery ignores the controversy surrounding the basilica and maintains the neighborhood's artistic reputation by serving as a final resting place for Vaslav Nijinsky, Edgar Degas, and Hector Berlioz. The traveler with cash in pockets and a way to keep it from pickpockets eventually leaves the district to head north. Here, he or she stumbles upon Les Puces, the celebrated "Flea Market" of Paris, always crowded and ever a truly fascinating shopping experience...
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| Jane Avril performing at Moulin Rouge |
Montmartre attracted the deformed Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, born in 1864 and the last in an aristocratic family line that stretched back a thousand years before his birth. At home in the nightclubs and comfortable with the dancers and prostitutes who worked in them because they simply accepted him, Toulouse-Lautrec sketched the scenes around him as he drank. One of his favorite subjects was Jane Avril. The painter and the dancer were occasional lovers. She had been born Jeanne Richepin, daughter of a high-end prostitute. Avril discovered her talent for dance while convalescing as a mental hospital patient. At roughly the same time as the Paris World's Fair of 1889, a nightclub manager in the Montmartre hired her to grace the floors of the Moulin Rouge. Years before she worked at that windmill capped symbol of decadence or a diminutive artist celebrated her appearance at the Jardin de Paris, she'd started her career as an entertainer by riding bareback in the circus...
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| Notre Dame and Eiffel Tower |
The Cathedral of Our Lady and the Eiffel Tower compete with one another to be "the" symbol of Paris. Age gives the former certain bragging rights: stonemasons started work on the cathedral in 1163. A fine example of French Gothic architecture, Notre Dame suffered desecration during the French Revolution as the mob sought to destroy anything that hinted of kings or priests. A half century later, it was the setting for Victor Hugo's tragic tale of a hunchbacked "King of Fools" in love with a gypsy girl, executed after her refusal to submit sexually to a hypocritical prelate. But, before either torch-bearing peasants or Quasimodo, the Cathedral of Our Lady became the spot from which distances in France are officially measured in 1768. Visitors to Notre Dame can see the marker outside the western doorway that designates kilometre zero...
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| Home to the Sun King |
Guidebooks tend to say if a person has the chance to visit only one place outside Paris proper, that place should be Versailles. The magnificent chateau favored by Louis XIII became even grander when his son transformed it into a palace housing 3000 courtiers. The son, Louis XIV, the Sun King, would reign from 1643 to 1715. His collecting of aristocrats under one roof was intended to further weaken the power of the nobility. It did. But, in doing so, he further eroded the disappearing feudal bonds between rulers and ruled. This would be one of many factors fueling the Revolution which began when a mob stormed the notorious Bastille Prison in 1789. Perhaps the most famous single room at Versailles is a 246' long room known to us as the Hall of Mirrors in which an absolute monarch could bask in endless reflections of his own glory...
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| Young ladies celebrate their national heritage in charming Gallic fashion |
Twelve avenues, including the world famous Champs-Elysees known for its club Lido, meet at a monument envisioned by Napoleon in 1806 as a lasting testament to conquests made by armies of Imperial France and its greatest Emperor. Its romantic neoclassical design and height of 162 feet were intended to evoke comparisons to the glory of Rome at its zenith. Bicycling enthusiasts recognize the Arc as the culmination of the last leg of the Tour de France race. Since 1920, The Arch of Triumph has performed the more sacred duty of sheltering the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of France...
Paris and but a few of her marvels...
Note: Postcards are from the personal collection of the author. Photographs of the 1900 Paris Exhibition and Jane Avril were found using Google Images.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
"We shall be in Hell before breakfast or San Angelo by noon"...
John Moore Shannon and his wife agreed on this as they rattled across southwest Texas in Crockett County's first Model-T one fine morning. The couple had taken the old reliable horse-drawn carriage into town before daybreak to pick up a new horseless one, just delivered by rail and waiting to be driven away from the depot in Ozona. The lack of an instruction manual didn't bother the rancher until he realized he had no idea of how to stop the damn thing once it started moving...
Shannon had already done some serious and rough traveling before this brief moment of crisis in the desert. Born in 1849 to a New Orleans family of comfortable means, he saw childhood privilege transformed into abject poverty after the Civil War and his family scattered to search for new lives. He worked his way across the country to California where he hired on as a sheep-shearer. With a few dollars saved and interested in ranching, Shannon crossed the Pacific to Australia to visit his dying mother. The return voyage led to a shipboard romance with one Margaret Campbell whom he followed to her native Scotland. Married two years later in 1874, the couple headed out to New Mexico and Kansas and then Missouri where John tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at real estate speculation. Next stop was Texas where, in the dry creosote bush country of Howard County, arriving with a net worth of $2.65, he got work as a railroad laborer in Big Spring...
His "big break" came in 1885 when Shannon and two other men contracted to fence the southern portion of the massive XIT ranch, said to have been the largest ranch in the world with more than three million acres, in the Texas Panhandle. With his share of the profits, Shannon bought sheep and land in the semi-arid desert of the Concho Valley. He prospered. By 1895, he owned 256,000 acres of Crockett County as well as good chunks of Irion and Mitchell counties. He ventured into banking and providing local telephone service...
Although John M Shannon was not the first to herd sheep in southwest Texas, he was among the first to realize the western Concho Valley and adjacent Trans-Pecos had the potential to dominate the nation's sheep and goat market. He organized the Wool Growers Central Storage Company in 1909 almost immediately after the coming of the Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient line. The firm established San Angelo as the "Wool Capital of the World." Sheep had been profitable in Texas for decades with major shipping centers in San Antonio by the 1880s and in Kerrville by the 1890s. With the new facilities and regularly scheduled rail service in nearby San Angelo, ranchers could cut travel time and distance to market by many days and 200 miles or more...
It was perhaps inevitable that the 6'6" rancher with unusually long arms would become a legendary eccentric. Bearded and described by a friend as resembling a Viking on a raiding party, Shannon was a notorious skinflint who used mesquite thorns to fasten his clothes when he lost a button. Nor was he shy about taking off boots during business meetings and plopping feet on the table to cut his toe-nails. The boots usually had holes in the soles. More than once, Shannon commented he'd rather walk on cactus than wear new boots. He usually dressed like a sheepherder, and a down-on-his luck one, at that. Folklorist J Frank Dobie recounts the probably true story of a traveling salesman who met a bum camped out near the Concho River. Feeling sorry for this freakish and pitiful-looking fellow, the salesman offered the man a dollar to groom and water his horse. The tramp thanked him and went to work. Talking to a banker in San Angelo later that day, the salesman mentioned his adventure with the strange character by the river. The banker listened to the description and then noted the bum was customarily addressed locally as "Mr Shannon" by virtue of the fact he was the richest man in the western half of Texas...
John Moore Shannon was likely a more complicated man than his reputation as a crank suggests. He may have been self-starting and self-reliant but does not seem to have subscribed to the notion of "every man for himself." During an economic downturn affecting his fellow ranchers, he co-signed or otherwise personally guaranteed over three million dollars in bank loans to his neighbors and linked his financial future with theirs. A devout Republican despite the party's role in the destruction of the Old South of his childhood, he may or may not have believed in eternal rewards and a heavenly God, saying that organized religion was useful for women and small children...
As for the latter category of persons, John and Margaret Shannon had neither son nor daughter to carry the family name on for another generation. In their old age, they left their ranch and turned the fourth floor of the Angelus Hotel in San Angelo into a primary residence. John Moore Shannon wanted his wealth to be useful to his neighbors, especially those with limited financial resources. His wife agreed. She died in 1931, not quite three years after her husband passed in 1928, shy of his 75th birthday. Her will followed her late husband's wishes: the Shannon fortune would establish a hospital for the people of Southwest Texas. Its endowment, including oil and gas royalties, came to the neighborhood of eighty million dollars...
Note: Photograph of John M Shannon from San Angelo Standard Times archives
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Experiments in Light, Color, and Form...
Church at sunrise
The edge of town
Static geometry
Monday, January 2, 2012
Jane Porter and Dejah Thoris-- smart, beautiful, adventurous, strong and inevitably victorious in hand-to-hand combat-- sprang to pulp fiction life courtesy of Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were ideal heroines who occasionally allowed themselves to be captured or menaced so their strong brave smart men, Tarzan and John Carter, could prove themselves worthy of being loved by such women. And, for adolescent lads, Porter and Thoris dressed appropriately for their roles as perfect mates, especially with the latter's contempt for clothing of any sort other than the occasional necklace or bracelet...
Their creator was born in Chicago in1875 and left this world at Encino, California, in 1950. Young Edgar Rice Burroughs hoped for a career as a military officer but was diagnosed with a heart condition while serving as an enlisted soldier in the Arizona Territory in 1897. Discharged from the service, he drifted from low-paying ranch job to low-paying ranch job until he eventually became a pencil-sharpener wholesaler. To supplement his modest income now that he had a wife and two children, Burroughs tried his hand at writing for the pulp magazines he loved to read. His first published story came in 1912 and the $400 he earned for "Under the Moons of Mars" was the equivalent of nearly $9000 today. Later that year, he published his first Tarzan novel. Fame and wealth indirectly allowed him to semi-fulfill his youthful dream of military service. In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Burroughs applied for and received permission to serve as a war correspondent...
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| Edgar Rice Burroughs |
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| Bookplate, Edgar Rice Burroughs |
Jane Porter became Jane Parker in the movies. In this, she was just another person told by Hollywood studios to change their names if they expected to get work in that town...
Ms Parker made her film debut in the 1934 production of Tarzan and His Mate. Portrayed by Maureen O'Sullivan, Jane Parker was one of the first characters to appear fully nude in a mainstream US film and one of the first to have clothes put back on her to appease the censors. Several versions of the scene were filmed. While O'Sullivan had no objections to being nude, the producers asked Josephine McKim (who had competed in the 1928 Olympics alongside Johnny Weismuller) to do the swimming portion of the "River Scene." This version did not make it into US theaters but was "restored" for the 1986 re-release of the film...
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| Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane Parker, Tarzan and His Mate, 1934 |
As for the Warrior Princess of the City-State of Helium on the planet Barsoom (Mars), she is both the spiritual descendant of the legendary Amazons of ancient Greek tales and a male fantasy of the highest order.
When Dejah Thoris first appeared in print in 1917, John Carter described her:
And the sight which met my eyes was that of a slender, girlish figure, similar in every detail to the earthly women of my past life... Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.
She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.
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| Cover art: John Carter rescues Princess Dejah Thoris |
Folklorists and anthropologists are doubtful about the historical accuracy of the old stories about Amazons. However, they point out traditional gender roles associated with hunter/gatherer and agricultural societies likely arose simply as a matter of convenience. It "made sense" that the partner taking care of children would also maintain the living area while the other scrounged for food and battled intruders attempting to claim resources used to support the tribal group. As societies became based more on trade and industrial production, these traditional roles became less useful or necessary. By the 1970s, this disconnect between History and Current Realities fueled the Women's Liberation movement...
As Edgar Rice Burroughs penned the adventures of Tarzan and John Carter in the years just before and following World War One, the winds of change were beginning to blow a bit more strongly. In the summer of 1920, women in the United States had won their battle to influence the outcome of elections. The Age of the Flapper had dawned. How do we reconcile our sexual desires with the roles we play in a transformed society was a question asked then and is one still unanswered...
Tarzan and His Mate, 1934, the River Scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPrWCCPADNs
Note: Images of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his bookplate and the description of Thoris are taken from "Wikipedia" articles on the writer and his character. Cover illustration of "A Princess of Mars" is taken from Google Images without further information on source or copyright data. Image of Maureen O'Sullivan as "Jane Parker" from "Tarzan and His Mate," 1934
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