Blogs
One More Stop on the Road
This week’s set of readings was very much a collection of the varied experiences each of these authors had as they traveled through the countries. The authors relate their interactions with the people they met in the different towns. From these readings, it seems everyone has a story to tell, even the author, as in the case of Ernie Pyle. In Home Country, Pyle describes driving across Iowa and reverting to a childhood memory. He writes, “I became conscious of the wind and instantly I was back in character as an Indiana farm boy again” (3). He goes on to describe a bit about his family and his life as a child. Much like the wind reminded him Pyle of his childhood, these descriptions reminded me of, well, my grandfather’s childhood.
My family is very big into documenting their lives. My paternal grandmother’s side of the family has published a family history dating back a couple centuries. My grandfather meanwhile, took it upon himself to write an informal autobiography of his life. When he did this a few years ago, it was emailed around to the various members of my family. Pyle’s reminiscences in a way reminded me of my grandfather’s.
My grandfather was born in 1924 in Clarksville, Iowa. During the Depression he was a child and a young teenager, but he still has some interesting notes about the times that I don’t really think come across in the readings. Whereas most of the readings discuss the American people in a sense of desperation, my grandpa had something different to say about the Depression. He was fortunate enough to not be especially hard hit by the depression; both of his parents had inherited farmland (totaling 320 acres) and his father owned and ran one of the five grocery stores in town (with a population about 1400). He does, however, still remember it as a time of frugality. He was very careful to note that while there was not a lot of money to go around, people’s expectations were so much less than they are today. People were also very careful about the way in which they spent that money.
Another interesting thing about my grandpa’s story is how he remembers the 1930s. He writes, “I would go barefoot during the summer all day long…my friends and I liked to follow the ice trucks, which delivered ice to “ice boxes”… we would pick up and eat ice chips on a hot summer day.” Even from this small childhood memory, it is apparent that not every part of everyone’s lives was focused on the hard times that much of the country was facing. For my grandpa at least, it was still possible to grow up in the thirties and have a good childhood.
That is so amazing that you
That is so amazing that you have your grandfather’s original writing on the time period. It must be so interesting to read about it from the perspective of an everyday man rather than a professional writer—whether fiction or not. I think that reading such an account, written for documentary purposes that were even more pure than the motives of the travel writers who strove to document but gathered information and wrote with a specific medium and outlet in mind, really helps to expose the subjectivity and process of selection that is involved in writing. Writing is after all an art, and is limited in scope, making it expressive, but incapable of complete inclusive representation. We base so much of our gut knowledge on what we read about a certain time period, however I can’t help but think how dramatically different interpretations of our time period we would get depending on whom we talked to, from a homeless man on the street, to the average college student, to a wealthy businessman. Even when reading the documentary writers, we must keep in mind that they were writing on commission, and looking for interesting stories, and which makes a better story, a comfortable happy boy or a homeless struggling girl on the road? We are certainly not getting the full story from these professional writers.