Growing Up Southern: August 7, 2017

I wish I could say it was a book by Dickens, but I was only in the third grade. No, it was a book about … ready? Red Ryder. He was the hero of the first book I ever read.

Red who? Red Ryder was a character created by Stephen Slesinger and artist Fred Harman. He was first a comic-strip character, later a book, movie, and radio character. They even made some TV pilots featuring him, but they never aired. He was a major cowboy star of the 1040s and1950s.

Most people now know him only as the name on the most famous BB-gun ever manufactured, right here in Arkansas.

I knew him best through the movies. A number of characters portrayed him over the years. My favorite was Wild Bill Elliott. At the movies, Red and his sidekick, Little Beaver, sometimes played by Robert Blake, would emerge from a large book as the title and credits began. The bad guys had better start running. He rarely shot to kill, further, I don’t think Red Ryder ever kissed a woman.

If you are over 65, you remember all this.

Anyway. I knew there were books, but I thought they were only for teaching us reading in school. Then I found one that belonged to my sister stashed away in a closet. I was afraid to ask her if I could touch it, so I would slip in and sit there looking at it in wonderment. It was about Red Ryder and some rustlers. And I could make out the words and the story! I began my journey.

Soon, I had read the whole thing. Red Ryder and Little Beaver had cleared the land of rustlers, and I knew that a magnificent new world had opened for me.

Yeah, yeah, I’m sure your kids were reading Proust in the third grade, some probably in the original French. But for me, it was a simple story about a fictional cowboy that opened the door to a lifetime habit that has brought me joy unspeakable.

I was in the seventh grade before I read my first Dickens, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. In the tenth, I read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and though bullfighting was neat until a brief viewing of a real one disabused me of that notion. Barf.

Fortunately, or perhaps by design, I married a woman who loves to read as much as I. Interestingly, she and I each read James A. Michener’s Hawaii while in the tenth grade, albeit several years apart, and have never since viewed missionaries in a totally positive light.

We still share common responses. The current antics from our White House send us to worn and ragged copies of Alas, Babylon, or On the Beach. That may not comfort us, but it prepares us.

Thanks to poor, simple Red Ryder for all this. It wasn’t a grandiose entry into the world of literature, but, to me, it was most splendiferous. After all, millions are alive today because someone wondered what that green stuff was on molded bread. Great things do grow from simple beginnings.

So, if the young folks won’t read anything but Harry Potter, let them. Proust can wait.