Random Iterations: The Sins of My Father
Well, what a week or so it has been. Sundance is officially over, but it isn’t over for me. I still have two more movies to see this evening and a few more posts to write. Writing so much about movies is fun, but it gets a bit difficult to fit into the spare moments of every day. That is, if you try to do it well. It is good to get it all out of one’s system while it’s fresh.
In the middle of my Sundance forays a couple of things, worthy of thought, came up and took me off track for a while. I’ll just touch on one of them now.
While doing my teeny chore of web-based research on the film Freedom Riders (an excellent documentary about groups of white and black students, primarily, who rode buses into the deep south in 1961 as a way of forcing desegregation of interstate commerce), I found myself sidetracked, at considerable length. The film got me thinking, for the first time, about how pro-integration whites were treated in the South. This has some import for me because I was, for my first six years which were spent in Arkansas, a pro-integration white boy in the South or, at least, the swaddled bundle that my pro-integration parents lugged around.
My father was a reporter for the anti-segregation Arkansas Gazette, then an editorial writer with the, also anti-segregation, Pine Bluff Commercial, then a Nieman fellow at Harvard for a year, then an editorial writer at the Arkansas Gazette. My mother was a part-time writer for smaller, largely union-owned, papers. She had the master’s in journalism from Columbia. He was, more or less, the Brad Pitt character in A River Runs Through It (without the Brad Pitt looks). It was the late fifties and early sixties and we all know about how that was for professional women in the “masculine” careers because we’ve seen the Madmen.
He was born on a proverbial dirt-scrabble farm in the proverbial tar-paper shack in northwestern Montana (between Kallispell and Libby) and ended up in journalism by ways and means that I’ve never understood. My parents met in Washington state where they were both reporters. He realized that the South was going to be the place to be for journalists of that era and sent clippings to the notorious Harry Ashmore.
I know a bit more about their (our) time in Arkansas than I did a few days ago because I found the University of Arkansas, Arkansas Gazette Project. Done for historical purposes, while most of the journalists of the civil-rights era were still alive, this is a collection of oral histories. There are around 130 interviews of most everyone who worked with my father at the Gazette, including a 78 page interview of him, done in 2001, a year before he died, which I didn’t know existed. Guess what I did all weekend.