Send in the Clowns
The Story Tellers
Where are They Now?
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
There is an
interesting archived video of Frank Sinatra.
In it, Mr.
Sinatra sings Send in the Clowns. The title may not be automatically
familiar to most of us, but the tune is recognizable. It existed when we were
young and when most of us can agree we were much more optimistic about our
world and the future, our country, and the children that would eventually enter
our lives.
As Sinatra
sings, there is a background compilation of classic entertainers, comedians
that were once on the TV screens in our living rooms. Milton Berle, Lucille
Ball, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Phyllis Diller, Jonathan Winters, Carol Burnett,
Flip Wilson, and many others who provided such skillful delivery of wholesome
and family centered entertainment.
As the
video plays out, you realize those people are not just missing from our lives,
but their progeny, the successors of their genre, no longer exist. Name one
comedian that modern day young and old can watch together, that is a household
name, that can command our interest, and will not insult our intelligence or
disrupt what little control we have over the eroding standards of our world.
They no
longer exist.
Where
are They Now?
In four
separate conversations this week, a parallel subject was discussed.
The late ‘40s, the ‘50s in their
entirety, and the years of 1960 through 1964 or 1965 may have been the best of
all times. There was a societal innocence with a different set of taught and
enforced values. There was honest patriotism and pride. There was expectation
of reasonable behavior. There was chained allegiance to family units and, as
that ranch wife of the Bootheel has said so many times, place. It was
not naivete that drove our culture, but actual, reinforced expectation of accomplishment
and doing something right for all the right reasons.
We had wonderful mentors.
They spanned all quadrants of our
lives. They were in the kitchens. They were at the filling stations. They were
behind the meat counter in the stores. They were experts at fixing radiators
and recaps, transmissions and clutches, and setting points and timing chains.
They could shoe horses and calve heifers. They could grow wonderful gardens and
they existed just fine with party lines.
Most of them not only didn’t wear
gloves they didn’t own a pair.
They prescribed effective remedies
without going to the drug store or the doctor. They painted our wounds with
Merthiolate or Mercurochrome. They poured castor oil or Pepsi down us depending
on how bad the belly ache might be.
They whipped us when they ran out of
patience or options.
Most of our doctors were there when
we were born. They knew us by our nicknames and normally diagnosed what we had
before they saw us. They asked us in front of our mothers if we minded and
cleaned our rooms. They made us feel like we might have some terminal disease
if we did not perform those chores.
We respected our teachers, and we
were scared to death of our principals.
We carried pocketknives from the
time we were just little. A good number of us had a whet stone in our front
pocket as well. Most of those were hand me downs from our grandfathers. They
were polished slick from use. It was those same grandfathers who taught us how
to make and keep those knives sharp.
They taught how to shoot, too.
We could drive by the time we were
ten or 11. There are some of us who can remember driving even before that when
those same grandfathers were spreading shocks of high gear out of the bed of
the pickup. We were told to keep the truck straight as we steered without being
able to touch the clutch, the brake, or the accelerator.
Those were the best of times.
The Story Tellers
There is another missing link to
today’s society and parts of this discussion.
It comes from the time before
television invaded and corrupted our lives. It was when we gathered as families
for events and days of importance. The best of that part of generational
bridging came later in the day or even the evening when we gathered in those
much smaller living rooms and homes and were filled with wonder and awe as the
stories were told.
Center stage was held by the elders.
It was their realm. It was their right.
As we know now, they
were masters at that craft. They had no doubt been taught by their own elders
in yet another, more distant past.
Of course, those who know will have
their own favorite stories, but those from the magic of the western past were
always the highlights. The timeline of this generational epoch was from just
after 1880 up until the night of the family gatherings ending in the mid ‘60s.
There were cattle drives, lightning storms, horses, cows, cowboys, dudes, cow
hunts, deer hunts, and wayward souls. There were wrecks and victories, and
there was always at least a hint of inflected humor.
The land itself was the backdrop,
the stage, and our true home.
We learned names of places, people,
and horses we had never met or witnessed. The horizons were literally the
horizons we had grown up within. Most of the enchanted listeners had never been
far from our place of birth.
We were taught, not by lesson, but
by acclimation of verbal history that we lived in the best of all places. That
was the place of our heritage. We would not violate the sanctity of it.
We would defend it. Perhaps that is the difference in what we observe in our
modern world and what the world once was. The clowns, the mentors, the story tellers,
and ties to the land itself are all important.
Just look around and observe their
absence.
Stephen
L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico.
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