Movies & Books

One of the main attractions in Mobridge, one of the only attractions in Mobridge when I was a child, was the local movie theater, the Mascot. Bill Zimmer, Rosalie’s father, worked there for years as projectionist, and she, like I, was fascinated by the films that came to town. The cost was minimal, a nickel when I was seven or eight, rising alarmingly to seven cents, then a dime, then twelve cents by the time I was in high school. We went religiously to all the movies that came to town, one on Friday and Saturday, usually a western or a horror flick, an A film on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, and a middle-of-the-roader on Wednesday and Thursday. And every week the schedule changed. If you didn’t see a movie on one of the days it was in town, you missed it forever.

I had my favorites. One of the earliest that caught my attention was Gunga Din with a youthful Cary Grant in India, and the final scene that sticks in my mind, when Gunga Din, the mortally wounded waterboy, crawls to the top of the golden tower to blow the horn signaling his English masters. It was thrilling for me, an act of selfless heroism. And with it on a Saturday afternoon was the other feature, King Kong with Fay Raye. Then in 1939 the movie that captivated a whole nation as well as all the young hearts in Mobridge—The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland. I know that movie was one of the main reasons I became a reader, beginning my early enchantment with all the L. Frank Baum books about that magical land.

Along with all the Johnny Weismuller Tarzans there were the Saturday horror shows, like The Mummy and The Return of the Mummy. I can still see the mummy, right hand on his chest, dragging his dead leg behind him as he pursued the lovely female. I remember The Black Panther and the scene in which the little girl had a choice of underpasses to go through on her way home after dark, the moonlit one or the dark one. She chose the moonlit one and the panther caught her just as she reached her door and then all we saw was the blood leaking under the casement to the horror of her parents. Later on there was the science fiction classic, The Thing, that scared us witless. And I remember the fluttering curtains and the book pages flipping in the breeze in The Uninvited with Ray Milland.

Then there were the comedies—all the Road shows of Hope and Crosby. I remember how we were all so fascinated with the comic bit in one of the Abbot and Costello movies, the “slowly he turned” routine: “Slowly he turned, step by step, closer and closer.” All the Danny Kaye films, especially The Court Jester and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

I remember all the times I fell in love with one film star or another—with the young, beautiful Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet and Lassie, Come Home, with Greer Garson in Mrs. Minniver, with Debbie Reynolds in Tammy and all the Tammys that followed.

I remember the WWI flick with Gary Cooper as Sergeant York, where the backwoodsman York used his skills at calling turkeys to trick the curious Germans into sticking their heads up from their trenches. Later I would admire Robert Taylor in the Apache film called Ambush, where the Indians dug holes in the desert, covered themselves, and then leaped up to kill the approaching cavalrymen. One of my favorite John Wayne films was the one he made in Ireland, The Quiet Man. And how could I forget Gary Cooper in High Noon with Grace Kelley. One curious thing about High Noon, though. I watched it again a year or so ago and couldn’t believe how hokey it was, the silliness of the background music, the staleness of the run-around-town shootout at the end. What I remembered from years before just didn’t stand up to a more mature viewing.

After I got out of high school, my fascination with films continued. I was a freshman in college when I first saw Joanne Woodward in her triple role as the woman with the splintered personality in Three Faces of Eve. I was so taken with her acting I sat through it twice, then came back the next night and watched it twice more. Another time I was there to see Tyrone Power in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, playing the impotent American newspaperman in Paris, tragically in love with Lady Brett Ashley. I’ll never forget the sound of someone several rows in front of me, saying loudly in the hushed theater, “Ohhh, he’s im-PO-tent.” About that same time I sat through An American in Paris four times in a row. Gene Kelly and Leslie Carone sang and danced and I memorized all the songs and all the dance numbers. I was then and probably still am a frustrated singer/actor/ writer/musician. I love movies. I love the way a darkened theater allows me to escape the humdrum of my own life to live again in the romantic roles of the people on the screen. I suppose I always felt my own life was too common to be acceptable, that I needed more romance, more adventure, more vividness than my ordinary South Dakota life could ever provide.

I earlier mentioned how L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz was a probable influence on my love of reading. Shortly after the movie came out, I must have asked for and then gotten an Oz book for nearly every birthday and Christmas for years thereafter. I know the books later went to brother Bob’s house and his children had them, but I often regret that I don’t still have them as mementos of my own youth. I wrote the following as part of a project I called "Dear Jackie," in which I wrote letters to my granddaughter. This letter, written in 1988, had to do with my early love of books and reading, a love that continued throughout my life and continues today. My purpose was to inspire Jackie to share my love of books. Now she’s twenty-three. I can see some of it rubbed off, but not as much as I’d hoped. I guess there aren’t nearly as many today as addicted to reading as I was. But then I never felt the influence of television when I was growing up.

Dear Jackie,

Today I donated a pint of blood to the Red Cross. It was my fortieth pint, my fifth gallon, and it made me feel good, like I’d accomplished something worthwhile. Not many people donate their blood, most being too afraid or too lazy. So today I probably hit a benchmark few people ever achieve. [Rosalie in the following years caught up with me and passed me by more than a gallon.]

On the other hand, in case I start feeling too smug, I read in the paper last week about a man from Jamestown who’d just completed his 25th gallon. My mind reels at the thought. A quick bit of arithmetic tells me that if he donated six pints a year, going religiously every eight weeks, never sick, never too busy, it would take him just over thirty-three years to get to twenty-five gallons. Amazing!

But my real point here isn’t blood or the giving of blood. It’s books.

Because I was already in downtown Jamestown at the Red Cross, afterward I decided to visit one of my favorite places in Jamestown, the Paperback Exchange. It’s an odd little business based on a very simple premise: books, hardbound as well as paperback, are generally very expensive these days, so why not open a place where people could bring their old paperbacks, receive a quarter of the cover price in credit to be used for purchasing other used paperbacks at the rate of half the cover price, and for those with no books to exchange, the price of books would still be only half as much as through regular retail bookstores. But through the exchange idea, the business would have a constantly growing and changing inventory of books.

That’s how the Paperback Exchange came to be. It’s located on the corner of Fourth and Main. Well, not so much on the corner as under the corner. You go down a half-flight of stairs and open an old glass-front door. A tinkling bell announces your entry. There are hanging plants everywhere, some in flower, most just green in various hues. The place is dark and quiet and smells like old paper, the mustiness of books that have sucked up moisture from the air. The room is about twenty-five by thirty feet, and lined on the back and side walls, from floor almost to ceiling, with paperback books. Those on the outer walls are alphabetized by author—A’s starting at the corner of the checkout counter near the front and running along the north wall, then east across the back wall, then south to the front windows.

The books in the middle of the room are arranged by type and then alphabetized—horror near the front desk, Action and Adventure next, then Westerns, Detective and Murder Mysteries, Novels into Film, Gothics, Science-Fiction, Biography, one long row devoted entirely to Harlequin Romances, and a tiny space in shelving around one of the floor beams for Classics.

Practically every book I’ve ever read or ever wanted to read or even heard about is somewhere in that room. Just the thought of going there makes me feel . . . how to explain it? . . . makes me feel anticipatory, excited, victim of a tiny nervous thrill as I approach the door. Non-readers won’t have the foggiest notion what I’m talking about, but real book nuts will recognize the madness. Jackie, I hope you turned out to be a book nut like me. Regular bookstores give me nearly the same feeling, and the bigger the store, the stronger the pull. But in a regular bookstore, the books are still virginal, and often multi-copied. They lack the personality of books that have already been read by one or more people: dog-eared, meaningful passages underlined, ghostly marginal comments, a grease spot here or there from lunch or bedtime snacks. And there’s no age limit at the Paperback Exchange (age of books, that is, not buyers). Some of them are priced at 25¢, a price that tells me they have to be at least thirty years old, maybe even older. I recently bought five or six Shell Scott mysteries by Richard Prather, all originally selling for 25¢. So they cost me 13¢ apiece.

You’re probably saying, “But libraries do all that—books read by other people, exchange privileges, all that.” True. Libraries have much the same effect on me, but not to the same degree. I’ve always felt a little intimidated in libraries, not by the books but by the librarians. I’ve always felt they were the guardians of the citadel and I was the interloper. When I was young, ten or eleven or twelve, I always suspected they were keeping a wary eye on me, like I might shout something obscene or maybe even try to steal one of their books. They (almost always grim, unsmiling, sharp-boned, sharp-tongued old maids) still make me feel somehow guilty whenever I step into their domain. Borrowing a book isn’t the same as buying a book, owning it forever and ever if you want to, even if you never get around to reading it. It’s yours. And no skinny librarian can take it away from you.

Library books have always had a way of hiding from me, disappearing into a stack of my books and then not making a sound. Then I find in the mail the dreaded reprimand from the library: “Where is our book? Return it immediately or we will confiscate your house and sell it at public auction!” Or worse yet, the phone call: “Sir, our records show that you have had several of our books for more than a year. What do you have to say for yourself?” And suddenly I’m a little boy again, head down, toe digging into the ground, sucking my thumb as my mother scolds me for forgetting to change my underwear or neglecting to take out the garbage. No, librarians aren’t my mother, just as libraries aren’t book stores.

I need to own books. And I’ve never gone to a bookstore without buying at least one. And at the Paperback Exchange, at least ten (well, after all, they’re so inexpensive). Your grandmother never could understand how I could buy a book and then put it on a shelf without reading it. I always intend to read it sometime, someday. But I have to know it’s there in case I need it.

Books have always been a big part of my life, even from the beginning. I can almost trace as on a road map the paths I’ve taken through my reading life, various books and authors as my guideposts. My earliest memories go back to a set of purple-covered books, heavy and leather-bound, probably called something like The Treasury of the World’s Tales and Folklore. And there were wonderful pictures in those books, intricately detailed forests with elves and fairies flitting about, and knights and dragons, and ancient sailing vessels teetering on angry, swollen seas. Someone, my mother, or more probably my older sister Helen, must have read those stories to me and embellished the pictures with tales of her own.

My next memory of books is of the L. Frank Baum series set in Oz, that joyful land of his invention. I was only six when the movie version of The Wizard of Oz came out, so that must have been what got me started. I must have been about eight or nine when I first started getting Oz books for birthdays or Christmases. I can’t remember. But I do remember the thrill of tearing open a present, knowing beforehand by the shape and size that it was another Oz book, a vehicle to transport me to a place where magic could happen, where people could choose their age and never grow older, where evil existed along with good but was always, always defeated. A girl a few years younger than me who lived a few blocks from our house was equally in love with the Oz series, Dink Stutenroth, and she and I would exchange titles. But the real thrill was in owning them, possessing them in case I ever needed to recall those places and people, those wonderful adventures. I’ve always been a great believer in re-reading books. Books you love deserve to be read more than once.

Eventually, after many birthdays and Christmases, I owned about fifteen Oz books. They were big, about eight by twelve inches, not very regally bound since most of them had been published during the war years, World War II, that is. But I loved them, regal or not, leather-bound or not. I remember the covers had a glued-on illustration of some aspect of that particular book, whichever character was the focus—Dorothy or Ozma or Tik-Tok or the scarecrow. And then, apparently, I outgrew Baum and his books and Oz. You can stay ten or eleven only in Oz.

The next road sign was science fiction, or more specifically, a memory of when I first discovered the joys of s-f. I was in either the Boy Scouts or the Cub Scouts, probably the latter since it would have been 1943 or 1944, during the war. Our troupe was on a paper drive—collecting old magazines and newspapers that people had bundled up to give to the war effort. I discovered a bunch of magazines called Amazing Stories—gaudy, sexy, poorly drawn covers featuring drooling alien monsters and half-dressed women. And inside, yellow pulpy paper. But printed on that paper were seven or eight stories and one or two episodes of serialized novels. Magic! And that bundle of magazines never made it to the war effort. It was my first encounter with one of the s-f pulp magazines that began in the 1930’s. But it wasn’t my last. Now Christmases could bring me subscriptions to Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories or Weird Tales. And the thrill of waiting for the mailman and then finding a new issue of one or more of them. I ate ‘em all up as fast as they came.

The next book stop must have been about 1945. My sister Helen, five years older than me, put me onto Edgar Rice Burroughs, specifically two of his books—At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar. What a lucky introduction to one of the most exciting and prolific writers of all time. Not a great writer, mind you, but to a boy of twelve, he was a wonderful storyteller. Helen told me where to find them in the Mobridge Library: first row of shelves left of the checkout desk, three or four shelves up. And with them were some thirty or forty other Burroughs books—most of the Tarzan series, the Venus series, the Mars series, and a few of the single books like The Timeless Lover, The Land That Time Forgot, and The Lad and the Lion. And I devoured them all. And then again. And then I started buying them for myself and reading them all over again. The Tarzan books took me to Africa and the Belgian Congo and to fantastic hidden kingdoms within the mountains and valleys and jungles of that far off land. And I went to Mars with John Carter and to Venus with, who? I can’t remember his name. And Burroughs led me to the other s-f writers of the Golden Age: Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, and many others.

Science Fiction became my entry into other worlds of writing. I can still remember the times when I was working in my Dad’s store on Main Street. Right next door, on the corner, was Swartz Drugs, and once a week they would remove the unsold magazines from their racks, tear the covers off, and throw them in their back storeroom. It was a corrugated shed attached to the back of their store. I would sneak over there during the day to see what coverless s-f treasures it held. Oh the thrill of finding a copy of Amazing Stories or Astounding Stories.

Jackie, I know I must be boring you to tears with all this talk about books. But I hope not. I hope you became as avid a reader as I was. If you didn’t, if you aren’t, then you’re missing out on all the excitement that can be found only in books. Anyway, back to the other worlds of books. I started reading Westerns (Zane Grey and Luke Short mostly), Mysteries (Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rine- hart to name just two), Detectives (Mickey Spillaine and Bret Halliday the two I remember most vividly), Historical Romances (James Street, Thomas B. Costain, Samuel Shellabarger, and many more). After I’d read my fill of one of the categories, I’d go on to another. But I usually wound up reading more science fiction than anything else. By the time I was in high school, most of my friends regarded me as some kind of freak, book freak, that is. I can even remember having books taken away from me when I’d try to read during classes. My teachers didn’t want me to waste my time on all that trash when I should have been listening to their lectures. I swear I don’t remember learning anything in high school. I must have, but I don’t remember what it might have been. Most of my learning came from reading on my own. I’ve been a teacher for almost thirty years now, and never in those years have I ever taken a book away from anyone in my classes. If they’d rather read than listen to me, more power to them. Reading is fast becoming a lost art among the students in my classes. That’s too bad. They’re so wrapped up in television and sports and other school activities they don’t have time for reading. And along with lost reading skill goes skill in writing. Most of their writing stinks, and it worsens as the years go by.

I joined the army in 1952 and went to Korea where I learned about a side of life they don’t teach in college. For much of the sixteen months I was there I had lots of time to fill, so I had my mother send me paperbacks at regular intervals. My plan was to read as many of the books that were then considered classics as I could. I read Melville and Hawthorne and Twain, I read the Bronté sisters and Dickens and Fielding (notice, there’s no mention of Shakespeare—I wasn’t yet up to Shakespeare), I read modern best sellers by such writers as Steinbeck and Hemingway.

Then in July of 1954 I got shipped home. And I’ve been reading ever since. Lately I’ve gone on a mystery kick—John D. MacDonald and his Travis McGee series, Dick Francis and his British horse racing scene, Ed McBain and his 87th Precinct, and Robert Parker and his Spenser series. My love of reading is probably the main reason I got into teaching, especially teaching English. The other reason was the summer months off to devote to the other passion of my life—golf. But that’s another story that I’ll get to in another letter.

Next week there’s a book sale at the Jamestown Library, you know, old hardcover and paperbacks contributed by people to help the library raise money for new books. I think I’ll drop in and browse a little, just look, maybe find a title or two I need. And your grandmother Rosalie will never understand when I come home with a bag of books. Or maybe I could just sneak them in with all the others on my shelves. What she won’t know won’t hurt her.

* * *

I wrote that over twenty years ago and it still expresses exactly what I feel about books and reading.