Morning Thoughts: Two Brothers

My mind takes me in strange directions. I’ve been reading, this week, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg. She talks about indentured servants in early America and how they were treated. This started my thinking about a family legend passed to me by my father. According to him, his grandfather had another son, in addition to my grandfather. I guess the other son was quite bright, and according to the legend, the old man “sold” my grandfather in indenture, to a neighboring farmer for money to “get the other son an education.” It was a practice perhaps brought from Germany by Great-Grandpa von Tungeln.

I believe the other son was my great-uncle George Henry von Tungeln Ph.D. Following is an account of his life with Maud, his wife.

“Dr. George von Tungeln was an early pioneer of rural sociology, and served as Chair of the Rural Sociology Section of the American Sociological Society. By 1932, Dr. Von Tungeln was Head of the sociology section of the Department of Economics and Sociology at Iowa State College, and had gained national prominence for his work. Maude also furthered her study at Ames and in 1929 became the 12th recipient of an MS degree in Sociology at Iowa State University.

George died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1944 at 61 years of age as he was completing his thirty-first year as a member of the Iowa State College faculty. In 1969, Maude established an Iowa State University scholarship in honor of her husband, which is now called The George Henry and Maude Drew Von Tungeln Scholarship. Maude died in 1973 in Santa Barbara California at 91 years of age. It is believed that Maude and George had no children because there were no children listed in census reports.”

From what I can find, George received a B. of Philosophy from Central Wesleyan College, a Master’s from Northwestern, and his PhD from Harvard.

Granddad? Well, apparently, he received some money from the deal as well, for after he married and began a family, he had money to invest in a future. He ultimately narrowed his choices, according to my father, between purchasing timberland in Arkansas or a flour mill in St. Paul, MN. One can guess the option chosen. After eight children and a tragically unhappy marriage, he led a lonely and strange life before his final passing in 1963.

I’ll talk more about Great Uncle George later. Today, allow me to leave with one quote from an academic paper he published in 1920, A Rural Social Survey of Lone Tree Township ClayCounty Iowa. He wrote:

“Normal life comes into this world with a nature that hungers after the beautiful and abhors the ugly. What is to be expected when as this life develops amidst surroundings it is being taught to call and think of as Home there is always more of the ugly than of the beautiful? That is no doubt one of the sources of rural problems.”

Yeah, he could have used a comma or two, but I sure wish I could have known him.

Legend has it that Granddaddy "Von"
was always bitter toward his brother.

Morning Thoughts: November 28, 2016

Going through some files this chilly, rainy morning, I ran across a note I sent, back in 1997 to the late John Woodruff, my longtime friend and editor. Oh, that unleashed some remembrances of things wonderful and good.

Arkansas has produced some fine people over the years, none finer than John. He was a beat reporter for the old Arkansas Gazette before it was killed off in our newspaper war. He then moved over to edit City and Town, the official magazine of the Arkansas Municipal League. There, he was my editor for several years before his death from cancer in 2007.

They’ve named an annual award after him at the League, It has a fancy name but it simply goes to a fine person connected with Arkansas cities.

I had known him for years before he became my editor. In fact, in 1980, we ran a marathon together. We were part of “downtown group,” living in Little Rock’s Quapaw Quarter. As neighbors, we spent many a happy hour in earnest talk aimed at diverting the agonies of long-distance running. That isn’t surprising. Digging out the best in life often requires pain.

In addition to his journalistic skills, John was quite a storyteller. Before cancer took him, he told me once about being a cub reporter for the magnificent Gazette—how he would return from a night meeting and file his piece just before deadline. Then, he and the others would relax at their desks and wait for the old Gazette building on Louisiana Street to begin vibrating as the presses started up for the first edition. He smiled at the thought. As I watch it rain outside, I smile, and can almost feel the building tremble and smell the printer’s ink. One can’t buy a treasure in life like having known John Woodruff.

R.I.P John ...
You aren't forgotten.

Old Memories

On Nov 22, 1963, 53 years ago this week, I was having lunch between classes at the University of Arkansas in an old house near the intersection of North Leverett Avenue and Cleveland Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas—a place I shared with a college roommate. Several hundred miles away, a misguided psychopath was taking advantage of his lunch hour to unwrap a cheap rifle he had smuggled to work that day in brown wrapping paper.

            While taking our lunch, we tuned into one of the few radio stations around at the time, certainly the most popular. It was, of course, the famous KHOG, playing the sounds of the Ozarks. A voice broke into the music to announce that noises, possibly fireworks, had been heard in Dallas along the route President Kennedy, Jacqueline, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird, and others were taking during the President’s visit to that city.

            The music resumed. Then the voice broke in again to say that the President’s vehicle had been diverted to the nearest hospital. The music resumed.

            By now, we were interested. We forgot about lunch and waited for more news. After a while, the DJ started a song with the lyrics, “I gotta woman, way cross town, she’s good to me …”

            Then the voice broke in again, saying, “We have word that President Kennedy is dead.” The music resumed, “I gotta woman, way cross town, she’s good to me.” I'll never forget those words.

            What to do? With no communication available, I saw no option but to make my 1:00 p.m. class in Sociology. Besides, my roommate had just voiced an idiotic statement along the lines of “That’s what happens when you don’t listen to the will of the people.” There was no option of remaining where I was. So, I walked up Leverett toward campus. I came to a small Catholic church and saw vehicles parked in all configurations and people running into the church carrying rosaries. I continued to “Old Main” where Dr. Grant Bogue taught us Sociology. I found the mood somber, confused, and tragic.

            A well-dressed female student began to ramble about some bizarre numerology theory concerning leap years and the years in which American presidents were assassinated. What did Dr. Bogue think?

            “I don’t think,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes, “that is any more idiotic than some of the other theories we will be hearing in coming days.”

            How right he was.

            My last memory of that dreadful time occurred several days later, as a group of us enjoyed the rare availability of a TV, watching the final services and the sight of young John Kennedy Jr., saluting his father’s coffin. A voice from one of the “Christians” in the room suddenly burst through the somber mist. “I just wonder,” it said, “how many people will be ‘swupt’ off into Hell watching that Catholic funeral.”

Holidays: 2016

Notes on the beginning of the holiday season, 2016:

I wasn’t in America for most of 1968. I only read about what was happening in “Stars and Stripes.” It sounded bad. Seemed like each week there was a new assassination or a new round of riots or a new recruiting office bombed. My employer—the United States Navy—and my shipmates and I had to deal with the internal tensions created by the mess back home in addition to carrying out our mission. In the midst of it all, an African-American sailor in my unit, the Naval Security Force in Da Nang, was found stabbed to death in a guard tower during the midwatch. I remember thinking, “How tragic, how utterly senseless, cruel, and monumentally tragic, to be sent home in a body bag at the hands of your own shipmate.

After days of lockdown and growing tensions, NCIS apprehended the killer. The murder had resulted from a personal feud between two members of the same ethnic group. A mother met her son’s body at the airport as the result of a disagreement between two Americans. A name is on the wall in Washington, instilled forever in cold black, granite, because one American killed another American during an attack of rage and hatred.

Despite all that, I remember the moment when the sight of land disappeared from beneath the airplane taking us home and seeing, below, nothing but the South China Sea. In an instant, those sparkling blue waters washed away all the fears, anxieties, and turmoils of the last year. We all cheered to be alive and going back to the United States. There were neither races nor colors on the plane at that moment, only Americans. What a great and wonderful feeling.

Maybe it would be a good day for us all to seek that feeling. Anyone tempted to post an incendiary note condemning an entire profession or ethnic group might pass on it for one day. Anyone tempted to fuel the fires of violent passions might just put aside the thought for a day. What a grand day it would be for us all mentally to fly back home to America.

Who knows what I was thinking?

Perhaps I recalled Matthew Arnold:

I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd, 

Think often, as I hear them rave, 

That peace has left the upper world 

And now keeps only in the grave.