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From: "Cathy Joynt Labath" <>
Subject: [IAPALOAL] A Prairie Boyhood in Iowa
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2002 17:15:20 -0500

A Prairie Boyhood
By Bruce Bliven

The Palimpsest
Iowa City, Iowa
August, 1968


...It has become a platitude to point out that the world has changed more
since I was born [1889] than it had in all its previous history. To
anticipate a little, I remember when there were only a dozen or so
telephones in Emmetsburg and you told Central the name of the person you
wanted to speak to. When I was ten [1899], electric lights in the home were
still a rare novelty, though arc lights were used for street illumination.
Every few weeks somebody had to climb a ladder to push the carbon points
closer together as the tips were burned.

My boyhood saw the beginnings of many things that are commonplace today. The
town's first phonograph belonged to one of my uncles. It had the big horn,
the fragile wax cylinder, and the handle to wind up the spring, that are
well-remembered today. Humorous monologues were more popular than music. The
favorit with us, as it was everywhere, was "Cohen on the Telephone."

The town's first automobile was, I believe, a Winton, purchased by one of my
rich cousins. The high tonneau of the Winton was entered by a short flight
of steps in the middle of the rear. I remember the delicious terror of
moving at such a height, and at twenty miles an hour, along the dusty roads.
Most of the horses we met went into a panic; my cousin would pull off the
road, stop the car, get out, and lead the frightened animal past.

Our first motion picture was not The Great Train Robbery, which I never saw
until it became a treasured antique. To Emmetsburg came a traveling lecturer
with a set of films which he narrated while cranking the projector. Folding
chairs were set up in the Masonic Hall, located upstairs over the drugstore,
and a thrilled audience saw such incredible spectacles as a train
approaching down a track, looking as though it were about to leap off the
screen, acrobats performing, and as a grand climax, a picture of Niagara
Rapids. The narrator told us that the night before he had shown his pictures
in Algona, and that someone in the audience said: "That certainly looks like
water." No doubt this was a standard joke told every night and attributed to
some nearby community.

We never had a movie house while I lived in Emmetsburg. A theater was
finally built, in which touring companies occasionally played one night
stands. The first that I remember was a romantic comedy along the lines of
The Prisoner of Zenda. No experience with drama in later live ever equaled
the thrill of my first contact with live, professional actors.

>From time to time a traveling medicine show came to town and performed in a
vacant lot near the corner of Main Street and Broadway. I remember one
pitchman, a large, placid gentleman, who, of course, called himself
"doctor". He sold soap as well as bottled medicine, and to prove its purity
he calmly sliced off a good-sized hunk of soap, but how this trick was
performed, I still do not know. My chief admiration went to the perspiring
young man, the doctor's assistant, who set up the platform and the kerosene
torches, sand songs during the preliminary warmup, accompanying himself on
the banjo, did a trombone solo, walked on his hands, did back flips, and
sold bottles of medicine at the end of the show, making change with great
dexterity, and as far as I know with complete honesty.

Once a year, the circus came to town and performed in a vacant lot a block
from our house. It traveled by road, in a series of huge red-and-gold
wagons, drawn by two, four or sometimes six horses. When they arrived,
usually about four o'clock in the morning, hardy, small boys were at the
grounds to meet them and to listen to the occasional growls of wild animals
from inside some of the boarded up wagons. I never got a chance at the
traditional task of carrying water to the elephants, but my family always
managed to scare up the price of admission. Since I lived so near, I saw the
morning parade assemble for its journey through town and break up after its
return.

Almost as exciting as the circus was the tent show of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
which played Emmetsburg now and then. For the scene in which Eliza is
pursued by bloodhounds, the show carried several huge mastiffs- far more
terrifying than real bloodhounds would have been. To my amazement, "Topsy"
turned out to have gone to school with my mother in Deerfield, and she came
to supper at our house. I was dumfounded to find that the incredibly
energetic fourteen-year-old, kinky-haired, black-faced Topsy was a quiet
white woman in her middle fifties, the wife of the owner of the show. I
began to realize the theater was a place of illusion.

...to be cont...



Cathy Joynt Labath
The Irish in Iowa
http://www.celticcousins.net/irishiniowa/index.htm

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