Discovering Our Past Through Literature and Images
The aroma from the row of barbecues blended into a single, sweet smell that masked the contribution of any single gas grill. Each of the cooks prepared a different cut of meat in accordance with the customs of the region of the chef’s origin, reflective of the multinational clientele that occupies the five-building apartment complex outside the capital. But, the crowd was exclusively male, as if the gender of summertime grill-masters is some sort of universal constant. Kids noisily played in the pool in the universal language of "splash," while the adults in the typically competitive sand volleyball game called to each other in at least three languages, English, Farsi, and Chinese. Like aviation, sand volleyball is an activity that requires only a handful of words in order for parsimonious-yet-complete communication and understanding. On the tennis court, a game was conducted in an Eastern European dialect that I did not recognize. Understandable, since my facility for foreign language gained in high school languished from three decades of neglect. Besides, California is home, and we speak a language like none other, "like totally rad, dude."I was talking to Bryce, a native from the great expanses of the intermountain west, about sports and my experiences with a local boxing gym, when he asked, "did you ever fight in the Golden Gloves? During the Depression, my grandfather fought in the Golden Gloves," he mentioned with an obvious pride before adding, "he also described fighting in ‘all comer’ contests with the winner getting a small cash prize." I chuckled to myself, drawing a perplexed look from Bryce until I explained that it sounded very much like what Louis L’Amour described in many of his short stories. I had just finished reading two stories with similar themes in L’Amour’s anthology Beyond the Great Snow Mountains released in paperback earlier this Spring. Bryce is familiar with L’Amour’s stories. All fiction is essentially autobiographical, but many of L’Amour’s characters would be hard pressed to live as adventurous a life as that prolific author, as documented in his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, published in 1989, a year after his death. Most people know him as a prolific writer of westerns. To know him for that genre is rewarding for a reader, but limiting for he was much more. His rich stories reflect his life in the west and as a world traveler, the lives of those who lived around him, and that of his ancestors.
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These two images, from more than 165,000 negatives in United
States government archives, show an amateur boxing match in small Southern town during the
Great Depression. The image at the left shows boxers touching gloves at the
beginning of the second round. The image at the right shows the boxer being attended
by his cornerman between rounds. Images like this provide a visual connection to
stories written about the period, such as the Louis L'Amour short stories.
One of the stories, The Money Punch, introduces us to Darby McGraw, a
19-year-old, lean 6-footer, who with a right hand but little else that has yielded nine
victories by knockout in small town bouts "against country
boys who knew even less" about boxing than he did. He takes his pursuit of a
title shot to Los Angeles and is promptly and decisively beat by "a comparatively unknown preliminary boxer." Darby, "with a sudden clarity saw the fight as it must have appeared to
others. A husky country boy, wading in and wasting punches on the air, while a faster,
smarter fighter stepped around him and stuck left hands in his face." He
decides to seek out more training. His trainer tells him, "there
is no such thing as a fighter born with know how. He has to be a born fighter in that he
has to have the heart and an innate love of the game. Then there is always the long
process of schooling and training." Great advice for any boxer, real or
fictional! In another, Sideshow Champion, the protagonist Danny McClure takes a
fight despite racketeers looking to fix the fight’s outcome. "The reason was simple enough. My ranch, the only thing in the world I
cared about, was mortgaged to the hilt. I’d blown my savings on that ranch, then put
a mortgage on it and built a house and some barns. If it hadn’t been for Korea, it
would have been paid off, But I was in the Army….The mortgage was due, and I
didn’t even have part of a payment. Without that ranch I was through. My days in the
ring weren’t numbered, but from where I stood I could see the numbers. I’d been
fighting for fourteen years…." To prepare for the fight he returns to his roots,
joining a traveling carnival troupe, the Greater American Shows, that was playing county
fairs throughout he Rocky Mountain and prairie states. He explains the circumstances to
the owner, Old Man Farley, and selects an alias as Bill Banner, "a ham an egg pug,
looking for work. I want a job in your athletic show, taking on all comers….Almost 15
years before, a husky kid, just off a cow ranch in the Strip, I’d joined the Greater
American in Las Vegas. Buck Farley, the old man’s kid, soon became my best pal. An
ex-prizefighter on the show taught us to box and in a few weeks they started me taking on
all comers. I stayed with the show two years and nine months….When I moved on, I went
pro." Recreational boxing is more than just working out and throwing punches.
It is a portion of the tapestry of our life experience that teaches us values of courage,
sportsmanship, and fair play to name a few. It also helps us to put into context works of
literature. The reader who picks up one of Louis L’Amour’s stories will be
enjoyably entertained and informed. We learn a little more every time we read a
well-written story. Yet, those who have experienced what he writes, such as boxing, can
share a special insight, a bond of experience, and through the printed word have a
personal conversation with the author that may elude other readers. This is a paradox
that makes reading so wonderful. It also allows us to more fully experience what life may
have been like at the time the author was writing. It is a link to the past. Carnival
evens and small town boxing clubs are pretty much fading historical memories. They are
memories that are visually captured in digital archives that are coming to us via the
Internet. Through our own experiences, we share those of the author and may gain
some insight into the artist's complicated life. Ernest Hemingway was one of the
greatest authors of the 20th century. His short stories and novels continue to be
dissected for revelance and meaning. Did you know that Hemingway was a boxing
enthusiast in his teens in much the same way many of us enjoyed the sport? As
biographer Carlos Baker noted in Hemingway, A Life Story, "In early 1916, Ernest discovered an
enthusiasm for boxing. He was large for his age and husky from his work on the farm
in the summer, and there was a streak of bully in his nature which began to emerge when he
learned the power in his fists. For a time, he used the music room (of the family's
home) for a ring, taking on a whole succession of his schoolmates, many of them smaler
than he. Grace (his mother) drove them out when 'boxing began to degenerate into
fighting,' and the locale was shifted to the small gymnasium in Tom Cusack's basement.
They also fought outdoors....Ernest often spoke in later years of having learned to
box befor he was sixteen from professional fighters in Chicago....Ernest allowed his
listeners to infer the faulty vision in his lefteye had been caused by the dirty tacics of
his opponents...and tolod his stories with such wholehearted conviction that his auditors
swallowed them whole." Baker contends that this story is revaling of the writer's personality
and style. "On the show off side of his character, which
was as real as his shy and modest side, he secretly enjoyed the open-mouth belief that his
yarns engendered. It helped enhance his reputation as the tough kid he wanted them
to think he had been, and also paid silent tribute to his considerable powers as actor
narrator. There is no surviving evidence to prove that he boxed professionals either
then or later....On the other hand, his interest in boxing may have prompted him to make a
few Saturday morning visits to (Chicago-area gyms) just to see ow it was done. If he
kept his eyes open and listened to yarns by some of the old guard, there was always a
chance of fresh materials for his short stories."