Paperboy faces changelings, delivers the news

1974 is now nothing but a memory.
A memory of conversations with a horse,
of a woman and terrible armies,
of change and books of dreams
— the battle lost, but experience gained
to carry on the fight.

Please click on the following to view:

• Tales of the future, straight from the horse's mouth.

• Smooth and comfortable on the right side of gate.

• Pooka, Patty, Photos, Papers and let's ride.

• Humor, sadness and the angry bear in a trap.

Humor, sadness and the angry bear in a trap

From what I have seen, there is a certain humor to losing you mind. True, it is that awkward, nervous, uncomfortable kind of laugh. But beneath that is a sadness … a catch-your-breath, can't-let-you-see-me-cry sadness, that puts a tremble in your voice to talk about it. Even deeper, there is a sense of betrayal. You can’t trust anyone. Not even yourself. It makes you angry — violent, strike-out, inflict-some-pain angry. There is no peace to the descent into madness. Life is crazy when you are losing your mind.
Back in 1974, Don Wallace was slowly dying, but he wasn’t going peacefully. I guess that kind of thing can make you crazy.
It seems to me, he felt the betrayal, the anger, the uncontrollable, uneasy feeling that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.
And when you are dying , I guess you think about legacy. What will you leave here on earth? How will they remember you?
That goes directly to the idea of memory. After all, when you leave, the only thing you are likely to take with you is your memories.
In the end, that is alternately the only thing remaining here — the memory of you.
To Don, though he hadn’t thought of it much before the cancer-imposed deadline, he was thinking about it a lot in the summer of 1974.
Patty Hearst, the Pooka, changes in world affected him greatly. And life on a time limit made him angry as a bear in trap.
My dad told me a story once about a bear that he and his older brother trapped on the ranch where they grew up in north western Colorado. Even back then there was a very strict prescription from Game & Fish regulating how to trap a bear.
But the bear was running off horses and raising heck with the rest of the livestock.
My grandfather had recently bought a sorrel mare from up around Baggs, Wyoming, (40 or 50 miles away) and my dad’s two older brothers spent almost a week tracking it from farm to farm all the way back there, when it ran off because it was frightened by the bear that was knocking around their place on Morapos Creek.
As result, shortly afterwards, they decided to try to get rid of the bear, and in adherence to the conventions of Game & Fish at the time, established a trap set up on the lower 40. Not long afterward, alerted by a terrible racket in early hours of the morning, and after waiting for daylight, soon found that a bear had indeed sprung the trap and took off down the creek, dragging the big log attached over the berms, and gravel bars, through the willows, and out into a grassy meadow downstream.
The bear however, tired from the dragging experience, had laid down somewhere out their in the tall grass and couldn’t be immediately located when my dad and his older brother Bill went to search for it. And they were pretty leery about running out into the tall grass after a wounded bear.
Eventually, the bear did rise up in the grass, as my dad told the story, and my uncle Bill shot it in the head a couple of times (from a distance) with a .30-06 to no avail. The bear once again took off down the creek dragging the trap and log. My dad and his brother returned to the house, told my Granddad what happened, and he, recognizing that they were a bit out of their league, sent the hired hand and his daughter (both of which had more experience with such things) to chase the bear. They were able to bring the bear carcass back later that afternoon and the hide nailed to the barn wall measured just over 11 feet from tip-to-tip according to the story.
That anger, and steadfast determination, was also characteristic of Don Wallace’s fight with cancer. Some afternoons he would be roaring about the injustice involved. Other times, he would lie quietly in the grass, trying to muster strength to rise up and take on his attackers head on.
In the meantime, he was also concerned about what kind of legacy he might leave.
To that end, as I delivered his paper to him one day out on his back porch, he gave me a small, leather-bound volume of poems that would fit in a pocket. He called it "a book about dreams." I kept the book and tried to figure it out, but at that age, I am afraid I wasn’t up to it. The book went in a drawer; with other things I meant to keep … and in time was lost. I remember only a fragment:

“You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
__ Edgar Allen Poe

Not long after that, Don Wallace’s presence on his back porch, waiting for news of the latest escapades of Patty Hearst, Richard Nixon, and the return of Florida Skunk Ape, tapered off. By late fall, I rarely would see him and I was busy myself, trying to figure out how to play junior high football. I would wonder about him each time I dropped a paper but there was no sign. By the time I was struggling with basketball, I had not seen him in months. I’d always think maybe I should have someone check to see if he was okay, but I never did.
One afternoon before practice, my friend Lynn (who delivered papers upriver at the same time I deliver them downriver from our houses) told me Ed Gould had found Don dead in his house. Apparently he had shot himself with that .22 pistol that once had rested there on table.
I don’t know what I thought about it at the time, or even now. Since then, however, at times I still think about the Pooka and Patty Hearst, dreams that can be carried around in little books, and the crazed anger of bear caught in a trap.
For me there is a certain humor to it, but it is that awkward, nervous kind of laugh, with sadness underneath that puts a tremble in your voice.
###

Please click below see related posts:


• Tales of the future, straight from the horse's mouth.

• Smooth and comfortable on the right side of gate.

• Pooka, Patty, Photos, Papers and let's ride.

Pooka, Patty, Photos, Papers and Let's Ride

According to legend, the Púca is an adroit shapeshifter, capable of assuming a variety of terrifying forms. It may appear as an eagle or as a large black goat, but it most commonly takes the form of a sleek black or white horse with a flowing mane and glowing yellow eyes. In parts of County Laois, the pooka becomes a huge, hairy bogeyman who terrifies those abroad at night; in Waterford and Wexford, it appears as an eagle with a massive wingspan; and in Roscommon, as a black goat with curling horns. By the beginning of the 21st century, depictions and conceptions of the Púca have changed from a fierce, terrifying spirit to a harmless, shy, garden-gnomish. The Púca is a creature of the mountains and hills, and in those regions there are stories of it appearing on November Day and providing prophecies and warnings to those who consult it. The Púca has the power of human speech, and has been said to call those it feels have slighted or offended it out of their homes for a ride. If they fail to appear, it will tear down fences, scatter livestock, and create general mayhem. From popular culture Puck, the goat-footed satyr made famous in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” draws from the mythology.
___ From Monstropedia, the Monstrous Encyclopedia.

I had never really been around sick and dying people before but for some reason, I think I figured out, or sensed, that was what was happening to Don Wallace.
As I delivered the Durango Herald each day, he waited out there on the porch for the latest on Patty Hearst and smoked roll-your-own cigarettes. His moods varied wildly and he had that far-away look in his eyes.
Some days it would be a surly nod and a distant stare. Other times, obviously happy to engage anyone in conversation, he’d attempt a lame joke or tell me something that he heard on the radio and ask if I had anything about that in the paper. At times, some of his cronies would be there as well.
Ed Gould, a former newspaper man himself, occasionally would drop by with groceries, goats milk, tobacco, or perhaps a bottle of Black Velvet. Gould would disagree with almost anything Don said. It seemed purely by habit.
Don, who knew I lived across the street from his brother Walt Wallace, occasionally would ask me about stories I had heard from Walt, and not refute them but embellish or add details that cast him personally in a favorable light. It seemed almost competitive, the storytelling gene among the Wallace boys.
“In September 1975, a year and a half after her life had been so brutally altered, Patty Hearst was found in an apartment with two other SLA members and arrested by the FBI. They charged her with bank robbery. Her family hired the famous attorney F. Lee Bailey to defend her in court,” according to Katherine Ramsland in article about the controversial trial.
Bailey, who had defended Sam Sheppard and arranged a deal for Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler), accepted the case with the requirement that he be granted book rights.
Don, and his visitors, often had a field day with the circus that the story had become.
I struggled with the weirdness of it.
How could a young woman from a rich and powerful family change so starkly in to bank-robbing terrorist Tania. The newspaper photographs were fascinating.
But the whole world was a little weird back in the mid-1970s.
It felt like we had somehow offended a force for order in our universe, and it was calling us out.
We had no choice in the matter either, if we didn’t go, it would tear down our fences, scatter our livestock and generally create mayhem.
Whether we wanted to, or not, we were all going for a ride.
###

Please click below to see related posts:


• Tales of the future, straight from the horse's mouth.

• Smooth and comfortable on the right side of gate.

• Humor, sadness and the angry bear in a trap.

Smooth and comfortable on the right side of gate

In the mountainous or hill region Ireland, many small lakes or springs are known as the Pooka’s Pool or Pollaphuca, named in respect for the changeling of Irish folklore. Some of these are the source of Irish rivers like the Liffey or River Bann. In County Down, Pollaphuca on the Mountain Mourne, is the home of a pooka of great notoriety. In rural County Down it still a custom to make the right side of your front door and gate comfortable, with the top of the gatepost smooth, and a with a bench. The left side gatepost is built with jagged rocks. The good friendly pooka will sit for a chat outside a house on the right of the door. The left side, with its rough and uncomfortable furnishings is reserved for malicious fairies, which are generally not as welcome.


From the start, that was one the reasons I was drawn to the newspaper business. The “Daily Miracle” was periodically new every time you picked it up. And the business marinated in the latest thing — in change. Maybe it is my short little span of attention, but the constant change appealed to me.
I liked elements of the past but the big draw was how much, and how fast, the world moved.
“A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow, “ wrote Edward R. Murrow. “There is nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I’ve done is agitate the air 10 or 15 minutes and then boom — it’s gone.”
It is true, you don’t change much yourself, but at least you are right there when it does.
Early exposure in the hot-type backshop of the Dolores Star, and then again, while hauling daily copies of the Durango Herald around in the front and back of the pouch that my head poked through the center of, seemed to rub off on me like the black from the paper itself.
I liked the way people waited for the news everyday. It was nice to be needed.
Patty Hearst, the Nixon resignation, the Watergate hearings, even sightings of the Florida Skunk Ape… they were all things that they cared about.
I liked the clang and ka-chunk of the linotype… the smell of lead burning into the oak floors along with the distinctive waft of ink and solvent, and good-natured razzing of the pressmen.
“Robber who Carries a gun,” is how printer Filbert “Shorty” Lobato used to mangle my name at every appearance in the Star building.
Later, when I dropped bundles of other papers I had worked on, I would still marvel at the usefulness of the product. And of particular usefulness, the small-town weekly paper.
Dean Alfred Vivian of College of Agriculture of Ohio State University wrote of the importance in the early part of the last century.
“Unless personal convenience is placed first, I think it could be shown that a country community needs a home newspaper even more than it needs telephones. Telephones are convenient means of communicating between individuals mainly for their personal concerns. The home-town paper speaks not with an individual voice, but for the community, not to individuals but to everyone, from the rich man on the hill to the poor man in the roadside cottage. Nothing goes further toward unifying a neighborhood than a good weekly or semi-weekly paper.”
It was the unifying effect of the paper (but in this case a daily) that I recognized back in 1974 as folks like Don Wallace, Emmy Froede and Bill McCabe waited each afternoon for the latest installment in the continuing saga of Patty Hearst, the seven-headed cobra and Symbionese Liberation Army, or President Nixon and White House tapes, possible impeachment and Haldeman and Ehrlichman.
I was an agent of change, or at least the messenger, and the right side of their gatepost was smooth and comfortable for me when I would arrive. They would always offer up space on the bench to go over what appeared in the papers that day, or the day before. And together we would speculate on what would appear tomorrow.
###
Please click below to see related posts:

• Tales of the future, straight from the horse's mouth.

• Pooka, Patty, Photos, Papers and let's ride.

• Humor, sadness and the angry bear in a trap.

Tales of the future, straight from horse's mouth

He said that the horse told him about dreams and such — about things to come.

By Rob Carrigan,
robcarrigan1@gmail.com

In Irish folklore, the Pooka is a changeling that is both feared and respected, and often considered a harbinger of changing fortune. And though it can take many forms, it most commonly appears as jet-black horse with sulphurous yellow eyes and long wild mane. Folklore expert Douglas Hyde called it a ‘plump, sleek, terrible steed’ which appears out of the hills and speaks in a human voice to people gathered to hear its prophecies and warnings on the first day of November. Binlaughlin Mountain in County Fermanaugh (home of the original Carrigans) is also known as the “Peak of the Speaking Horse.” According to Hyde, it offered “intelligent and proper answers to those who consulted it concerning all that would befall them until November the next year. And the people used to leave gifts and presents at the hill…”

When I was 12 years old, beginning in April of 1974, as I delivered copies of Durango Herald every afternoon in Dolores, Colo., I befriended an old man by the name of Don Wallace that would wait for his paper every day on the back porch of his Pepto-Bismol colored house near the river.
He was a former ranch hand, cowboy, and veteran of various other vocations, that (although I didn’t really understand it at the time) was dying of cancer.
Don followed with great interest the unfolding saga of kidnap victim turned bank robber Patty Hearst and Sybionese Liberation Army.
Waiting for the paper was a pretty regular thing for the folks on my paper route through that summer of 1974, as President Nixon faced possible impeachment and eventually resigned in early August. Among other events, there was the Dixie County sighting of a Florida Skunk Ape in July that year. It really wasn’t what you would call a slow news period.
But the Patty Hearst story was compelling.
“Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people,” was the slogan of the SLA and a seven-headed cobra snake its symbol. The members of the army were known on occasion to use cyanide-laced bullets.
Patty Hearst’s conversion from the straight-laced heiress of the Hearst newspaper fortune to a bank-robbing “fundraiser” renamed Tania, sporting automatic weapons at various robberies and car jackings with the terrorist group was a hot topic. In May, Patty (a.ka. Tania) fired a series of warning shots at a storeowner that was trying to detain SLA members, Bill And Emily Harris, when they were caught shoplifting in sporting goods store in Los Angles.
The next day, in a two-hour gun battle between the SLA and 500 Los Angeles police officers, where nine thousand rounds were fired, and six SLA “soldiers” were killed, the SLA sealed their international notoriety. Hearst was eventually arrested in 1975 and brought to trial in a sensational legal event, in which she was defended by superstar lawyer F. Lee Bailey.
I think Don Wallace was struck by the changing nature of the world that summer and the newspaper that I dropped every afternoon, was his way of dealing with it.
He would tell me stories of the wild west of his childhood, talk about his dreams for the world and suggest books that I should read.
He claimed, among other things:
• He could kill fruit flies at a distance of 15 feet with the .22 caliber revolver that rested on the table next to him out there on his porch as he waited for the paper.
• He also swore that his former acquaintance Brushy Bill Roberts was really Billy the Kid.
• A revolution was in the works with the emergence of groups like the S.L.A.
• Tom Horn was the opportunistic alcoholic assassin hired by absentee English cattle barrons and eventually got everything he deserved.
• He once had a shoot out in a New Mexico chicken house.

But Don also told me of a wild-eyed, jet-black stallion that he once owned. He swore up and down, that the horse could talk to him.
I remember asking him what they talked about and he said that the horse told him about dreams and such — about things to come.
###
Please click on the following to view:

• Smooth and comfortable on the right side of gate.

• Pooka, Patty, Photos, Papers and let's ride.

• Humor, sadness and the angry bear in a trap.